


Wait for It

by mindbending



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Child Abuse, Earthbending & Earthbenders, Gen, Identity Crises, Mental Health Issues, Minor Character Death, Violent Thoughts, beware the angst coma(s), could be read as brief jetko if that's your thing?, earthbender!zuko, several relationship dynamics flip upside down, since this zuko is 500 trust issues held up right by a bodice of swords
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:01:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 42,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26415337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mindbending/pseuds/mindbending
Summary: Prince Zuko is born with eyes of pure gold, the surest sign of a strong inner flame.Prince Zuko is born unlucky. He has no fire to speak of. No spark of potential.(Until swords start bending to his will.)
Relationships: Iroh & Zuko (Avatar), Jet & Zuko (Avatar), The Gaang & Zuko (Avatar), Toph Beifong & Zuko
Comments: 1218
Kudos: 2412
Collections: A:tla, Finished111, Genuary 2021, The Best of Avatar the Last Airbender, The Best of Zuko





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> 2020 hasn't yet killed me, despite several valiant attempts. Here’s a weird longfic to celebrate!

Prince Zuko comes into the world with eyes of gold, the surest sign of a strong inner flame in any descendant of Sozin.

Prince Zuko is born at midnight in the dead of winter. The sages who stand by whisper that there could be no less auspicious time for a firebender. His firebending will be late and weak, they whisper, if it ever even comes.

On Crescent Island, the ground below Avatar Roku’s temple rumbles, shaken by hidden tides of magma. No one notes them at all.

/

Loudly and to anyone who will listen, Father insists the sages are wrong. In silence, Mother prays they are. They wait for Zuko’s fire, as he meditates for endless hours before a candle, as he practices flameless katas and stumbles through the traditional forms, memorizing them diligently though they don’t feel like his _own._ Father watches him with intense interest and then none at all, his focus shifting to the little princess who sets her crib alight.

For one night, they have hope. Zuko stares at a steel candelabra. There are handprints still throbbing warm on his seven-year-old arms under the flaring crimson sleeves. He _hopes_ so hard and breathes so stubbornly, and the flame jiggles in time with his exhales. He's not imagining it. He doesn’t know why it won’t happen again once Father comes in, why it worked in front of his mother but now there’s only fire that isn’t his, too close for comfort.

It’s too close, but Zuko’s too stubborn for his own good. It’s in his blood. So he stands his ground because the candle’s flame _had_ moved, Mother _saw_ it and he swears, he swears they’re not lying. He stands his ground and he stamps his foot, and his heel comes down too hard and somehow leaves a dent in the floor. He doesn’t even notice at first. 

Father does.

They’re in an old part of the palace anyway, there must have been a weakness in the metalwork after too many winters, and Mother says all this and more in a plaintive cry, and it doesn’t stop the fire.

/

Father leaves bruises. Zuko does too, little dents in his bedroom walls when he smacks them harder than he meant to. He covers them up with tapestries, flowing red with the Fire Nation’s flame printed boldly. Exhausted, he falls onto his bed- a bed fit for a fire prince, with a mattress soft as clouds that leaves him sore and aching from the lack of support- and closes his eyes.

Sometimes, he can only calm himself by imagining the ground breathing steadily with him. Up. Down. In. Out.

/

At age nine, the doctors and trainers and sages all agree that it won’t happen, not for Zuko. He gave up hope before they did, snuffed it out like you have to with flames that might flare out of control. He turns invisible to his father. He’s always been invisible to his sister; before she could form full sentences she sized him up and judged that a non-bender’s no threat to her, and so she treats him only with cutting silence. Neither of them ever speaks to him. He could melt into thin air and nothing in their lives would change. 

He digs his feet in instead, the way he digs his fingers into the garden soil by the turtleduck pond whenever Mother’s not looking.

It’s sheer obstinacy. He’ll never be a fancy firebender, he’ll never have flame at his fingertips or his father’s full regard, but there’s other ways to be worthy of a Fire Prince’s crown. He’s pulled unceremoniously out of firebending lessons at age nine and thrust into military training instead. With relish he seizes the opportunity. The lessons hold his interest, but for a time Azula still outshines him, until one of his tutors puts a sword in his hands.

Maybe it’s the years of practicing katas, but swordfighting comes to him easy as breathing. The blade they give him- half-sized, a dull, dinged-up practice sword that’s had a hundred users before him- feels like an extra limb the second it meets his palm. He trains all day. He barely breaks a sweat. For once, he knows how Azula must feel, how effortlessly prodigious, because after a few months the sword seems to move on its own, like it’s pulling his hand and not the other way around. 

His trainers refer him to Master Piandao, a visiting swordsman from the countryside who brings a whole array of blades for him to try. After a single lesson on the process of forging your own weapons, Zuko’s adopted all the expert terminology, chattering away about chemistry and temperatures and proportions. 

Piandao watches the boy carefully and lets him try out every sword he’s brought, even the longswords that should be too heavy for someone this young. The prince takes each with enthusiasm- with delight in his eyes that never quite overflows to a smile- and he brandishes each with unnatural ease. He swings even the largest as if it’s feather-light and hands it back with a bow. Piandao swings it once himself for good measure and frowns, because he made this blade himself and the point of balance was _not_ this close to the hilt.

He at last bestows a set of twin _dao_ upon Zuko, because a boy of his unusual skill can handle two blades, and he takes his leave. Upon returning to his manor, he makes a vague, discreet inquiry amidst the Order of the White Lotus about whether there’s any theoretical basis for metalbending.

(When the letter at last reaches Ba Sing Se General Iroh can’t make sense of it, burning up with both grief and fever.)

/

Zuko grows bolder when his father’s not looking. There’s whispers of power in his veins, red-hot and liquid. The military whispers that he’ll be the world’s greatest swordsman at his height, because he regularly achieves the impossible with a blade in his hand. He grabs his opponents’ swords from their hands without breaking his own skin, he slashes through armor like it’s only silk cloth, he throws the knife Uncle sent him with precision even Mai envies-

Grandfather still wants him dead, once the earthbenders kill Lu Ten. He still threatens to execute Zuko at eleven years old, not for any fault of his own but to teach Father empathy. Zuko wonders whether the Fire Lord would ever discard one of his own grandchildren if he fit into the family history the way they expected, if he could bend fire, and laughs hysterically at the thought. Of course not. His family’s not _that_ warped.

He thinks of grabbing his _dao_ and defending himself, of digging in and fighting his death, but Mother beats him to it, so silent and subtle he can’t know for sure.

“Never deny who you are,” she tells him, before she disappears into thin air.

Zuko wishes, some days, that she’d taken him with her. He wishes he were in some foreign land, because the flame on every sign in Caldera taunts him, makes his so-called country feel like an alien land. But she didn’t, and he’s not, and he sees no choice but to face his future head-on.

He blocks out Azula’s silence and Father’s constant disapproval, safe behind an unbroken shield of rock.

He refuses to bow his head. He wields his dual swords openly, flashily, and the metal’s flickering in the sunlight is the closest he can get to firebending. The generals take notice of his strategic acumen. In time, his father does too.

He is Prince Zuko, a royal in line for the Fire Lord's crown, and he will not bow his head and shy away from probing looks and cower just because he can’t bend.

He is Prince Zuko, and so he curls up in dusty palace chambers now veiled with white sheets, in the disused rooms Mother had kept near the end, as far as possible from Father’s suite. He curls up and presses down the tides of fire forever shifting in his head. He opens drawers and cabinets, running his hands down her old gowns, loosing his top-knot to brush her old comb through his hair. 

One day he opens a safe, protected by a metal lock that he breaks easily (isn’t it obvious, the whole mechanism rattles _loud_ every time the tumblers fall into place), and he finds her crown abandoned inside. The wave of rage crests. He stuffs one fist against his lips and clenches the other around the golden hairpiece and sobs.

When the tides recede, he uncurls his body. Uncurls his fist. Finds the gold crown crumpled like paper, bent impossibly in his hands.

/

Zuko keeps his secret to himself and carries it around with silent delight, like when he and Mai palm pastries from the kitchens. It explains so much. The way the palace’s metal walls and floors always buckle under his rage. The way swords shift and float in his grip, drawn less by his limbs than his mind. He doesn’t know how or why, he doesn’t yet care, but he’s been blessed with _metalbending._

He’s not perfect at it yet (and how could he be, with nobody but boring old firebenders to learn from). He tries and tries, but he can’t un-dent any of the surfaces he’s wounded over the years. He can’t mold Mother’s crown back into the correct shape. He can break things, but he can’t fix them.

That’s all right. All the Fire Nation wants its benders to do is _break._

He contemplates the advantages of metalbending from a military perspective, once he reaches his full potential. He’ll be able to single-handedly crumple ships. He’ll repair catapults with a few waves of his hand. Ba Sing Se’s wall won’t stand a _chance_ against him.

He’s not a firebender, no. He’s something new, something better, tempered by flames and hardened like steel. He’s a fitting leader for his country of iron and war machines. He fits. He can wear the crown. He can head a new age of unprecedented conquest. 

He fans this new flame of hope.

/

Zuko is no firebender. Maybe if he was, he’d have an openly fiery personality to match and he’d shout his secrets immediately from the nearest available rooftop. Instead, he moves slowly, deliberately, strategizing at every step.

(He has no fire or lightning to protect him, so he builds walls upon walls.)

He means to claim his place in the Fire Nation’s kratocracy. To that end, he’ll indulge in theater. Father lets him sit in on military councils regularly so long as he says nothing, and he waits, a little shadow at his father’s side. The generals plot to invade Ba Sing Se by subterfuge, and he says nothing. The generals scheme to crush rebellious earthbenders in the colonies, and he says nothing, feeling oddly guilty in his silence.

The generals threaten to sacrifice a new Fire Nation division as bait for an ambush, and Zuko strikes while the iron’s hot. He rises to his feet slowly and declares his disdain for the general’s tactics. For a moment, there’s only silence. Father gapes, uncertain what to _do_ with him.

He’s new, like nothing they’ve ever seen before.

“If you don’t agree,” Zuko tells the general calmly, “there’s only one way to resolve this.”

/

“Just to check,” Zuko says to the deputy legal secretary tasked with managing affairs of honor, “it’s entirely legal for me to wear armor of my choice, right?”

“It is,” she assures him, worry etched deep around tired brown eyes. “Firebenders prefer to dance lightly across the arena, but a non-bender may choose to wear their armor. But Prince Zuko-“

He looks quizzically at her.

“No non-bender has participated since before Sozin’s time. Surely you don’t mean to take on this challenge yourself?”

Zuko frowns. “Who else would?”

She pauses, tucking back a stray grey curl. “Your father consulted me recently on an obscure provision that allows someone to replace one party, if they were also disrespected by the initial offense.”

That gives Zuko pause for a moment as he dons his heaviest armor. It’ll be strong enough to keep him safe, even after he strips away the excess weight and bends himself a crude but usable sword on the field. He can win this battle. He’ll metalbend on the national stage, announcing his abilities in the most public fashion he knows. By metalbending, he’ll seize his place in this country.

He has his battle plan, but for a moment he hopes Father might intervene, might step in as his champion and fight _for_ _him_ in this Agni Kai.

/

“I meant you no disrespect, I am your loyal son-“

“You are no son of mine.”

Zuko thinks for an instant of fighting, but he waits too long. He waits, slow as rock, stupid and pleading and full of hope-

(He forgot there’s no point to hoping, for someone like him.)

He burns _easy,_ the way non-firebenders always do, skin shriveling fast as the flame spreads like wildfire _._ Caught up in the drama of the duel, no one notices the earthquake- quiet, quivering like a child’s heart- as he screams. They don’t notice the narrow tendril of smoke, escaping from cracks in Caldera’s crater.


	2. Chapter 2

Fire is resilient. It smolders to embers and resurges once more. It springs up over and over, spreading fast, defying containment, refusing defeat.

Once broken, stone stays broken.

/

Infection inflames Zuko’s wound. He falls into a dangerous fever, mumbling about armor, crying out in wordless despair, so Iroh cannot demand answers. He can’t ask exactly how a boy without flame planned to survive a duel with a firebending general, even if he never expected Ozai to intervene. He can only hold his nephew's hand in the palace hospital and murmur comforting nonsense.

When Ozai’s full verdict comes down, Iroh leaves the boy in the palace doctors’ care and steals into his chambers to pack. The clothes are easy enough. He takes the best of Zuko’s weapons; though Iroh’s no expert, he can recognize fine craftsmanship when he sees it. He brings a chest of trinkets, theater programs and opera masks and dancing shoes all covered in dust, no doubt untouched since Ursa’s departure. Iroh takes the tapestries tacked all around the room, in a show of childish patriotism that hurts his heart, and uncovers a constellation of dents below.

Zuko’s flushed but mercifully asleep when he’s moved onto the _Wani,_ yet he awakens as they prepare to set sail. He moans, and the ship’s metal groans with him, and Iroh has to halt the departure and reason with Ozai and order repairs for twenty crushed pipes (the damage was previously unspotted, according to Ozai, but he wonders whether to trust his little brother’s word). 

He tells Zuko none of this, not when the boy wakes from the fevers and hears out the terms of his sentence and utters not a word of protest, hardening instantly to acceptance.

/

When Zuko wakes, he’s at sea. He knows it even before he opens his eyes, the sense of imbalance, of rootlessness as the ocean rocks the ship. He feels the lack of solid ground instantly. There are waves, obviously, but he can’t pinpoint the current like breath that he always felt coiled below Caldera.

When he opens his eyes, it’s to his uncle’s kindly face, to his apologetic voice and his attempts to soften the blow.

Apparently, Zuko’s exiled from the main islands of the Fire Nation “until he finds the Avatar.”

“Where do you wish to search first?” Uncle Iroh asks him, wide-eyed and sincere, and Zuko stares back, fighting off a hysterical laugh.

Finally he gives his stone-jawed reply: “Nowhere. It’s meant to be an impossible mission, isn’t it?”

Uncle’s stricken look is answer enough.

He snorts. “Then there’s no point hoping.”

“Then where do you wish to go, Prince Zuko?”

Zuko’s traitorous heart whispers of a pond occupied only by turtleducks in a land that’s not his.

“There aren’t many places where a Fire Nation warship won’t be destroyed on sight,” Zuko says in a steely monotone. “Pick.”

/

Fire. Air. Water. Earth. Four nations, and none of them are his.

Zuko tries to remember his last days in the Fire Nation. They feel like someone else’s memories, all poisoned by a golden glow. He can see his foolishness clearly now. He doesn’t know how or why, but he bends metal. It’s not a blessing but a curse. He was born _wrong,_ an outcast from every element and every part of the world order, he was _naive_ for thinking he could be anything but a circus freak. 

(He sits too still in his bed and drowns, weeping until his eyes feel bloodshot and rusted, too worn for a single tear more _.)_

On the inside, at his core, he has never belonged to any of the four nations. There’s a charming irony to his new situation. At last his legal status of statelessness matches his reality.

/

There is a second part to the sentence: Prince Zuko is no more. Though Uncle persists in using it, he’s lost his title. He’s been stripped too of the right to the throne. The five-pronged golden crown will never be his.

Silently, his jaw set firmly against any further tears, Zuko wonders how long the Fire Lord had plotted that particular twist of the knife. Since his ninth birthday, if he had to guess.

He never belonged in the Fire Nation. He was a weed encroaching on an ornamental garden, a crack in a pane of glass. He’d suspected all this as a child, before he let his brief joy at metalbending delude him. He’s got hard proof now, and he can’t look away.

(If he were a different sort of child, Zuko might be tempted by false hope, might actually throw himself off the cliff of searching for the Avatar. As he is, he sees no way to survive these facts if he doesn’t barrel into them head-on.)

Eventually, he starts counting himself lucky. He’s lucky he could never firebend. He’s lucky to be rid of a country that never noticed his existence. Now, there’s nothing left to him but a metal bucket of a ship and his bending, too heavy in his blood. He must rise from the dust and keep on moving.

/

Uncle Iroh sets the _Wani’s_ course. They meander across the seas, visiting the occasional uninhabited neutral land, dropping in on Fire Nation outposts and colonies. Zuko looks at the map stretched out on the bridge, dotted with possible routes, and can’t bring himself to care. He’s not sure how Uncle picks his destinations. Maybe for the natural scenery. Probably for the exotic tea blends. Zuko lets him sail without complaint or comment.

In contrast Uncle watches him closely, attempting with varied levels of tact to draw him into conversation. Maybe he expects his nephew to rave out loud, to break walls and holler at shadows. Zuko ponders it and finds he doesn’t have enough energy left for hollering.

Mostly.

Uncle does his best to keep him away from mirrors, but it took only an empty room and a free minute to smooth the side of a metal pail to a mirror’s polished sheen. He manages to curve it again before he breaks down screaming.

(He’d already guessed by feel when they first removed the bandages, but it’s another thing to see it, the angry red crater in the side of his face. His skin doesn’t have the natural flame resistance that a firebender’s would, so the wound _sprawls._ It’s most dramatic around his eye socket, where the Fire Lord’s fist made direct contact, but there’s puffy puckering all the way down his cheek to the jaw. His hair’s all gone, though he doesn’t know if it was shaved or burnt off; now there’s only thin greyish fuzz he’ll have to grow out again. His ear’s crusted over with scar tissue, and the ship doctor tells him it’s a miracle the inner mechanisms remained intact. The gold of his left iris is dimmed. That eye sees the outlines of light and shadow and little else.)

(His other eye works just fine, so he screams.)

He yells too when he misjudges distances, when he tumbles down stairs he can’t make out properly anymore. He doesn’t dare resume his training. He’s a metalbender, but he doesn’t want to lose an arm along with an eye.

“If I may,” Uncle murmurs one night, in an insistently gentle tone that ought to irk him but only grinds down his walls, “you might find some healing in meditation.”

“I’m not a firebender,” Zuko counters. “If I were, I’d never have ended up here.“

Uncle hums thoughtfully. “Still, the breathing exercises may calm your mind.”

Zuko acquiesces with only a little grumbling, because for all his antipathy towards the Fire Nation he can’t bring himself to alienate his uncle. So he arranges himself cross-legged at Uncle’s direction and breathes in and out like he did as a child, though at last they’ve dispensed with the pretense of the candle. Despite the chaos of the waves and his own lack of belief, quiet settles into him. He closes his eyes and seeks inner peace.

Until something rattles behind him.

No. That’s not right. He didn’t hear anything, and he certainly didn’t see anything. He just _sensed_ something hitting the metal floor behind him. Something flat and round…

“Did you steal my _fish?”_ Zuko says, inner peace completely abandoned.

“I. Er…”

Scowling, Zuko whips around and finds his uncle clutching a dinner plate. _His_ dinner plate. “I told you I’d eat it later!”

“How did you know?” Uncle asks, bewildered.

“I…” Zuko stops, because he’s not sure about that himself. “I guess I smelled it?”

Uncle smiles beatifically at him. “I told you meditation helps tune all the senses.”

Zuko nods and returns to his position. Once again facing forward, he adds, “I still want my fish.”

“Aw.”

/

Zuko didn’t smell the fish.

He meditates everyday, for hours like a good firebender would, but he abandons the traditional position to press his ear against the metal walls and floors. The metal conducts vibrations, and he focuses hard, isolating the chug of the engine and the bustle of the kitchen and the tap-tap-tap of tiles from _pai sho._ Maybe he’s imagining it all, but he starts walking with his left hand on the wall and he can guess when a room’s occupied before he even enters. He may have lost one eye, but this is a whole new way of seeing.

“I need something to help me get around,” he tells his uncle the night before their next stop at port. 

“Of course,” Uncle Iroh replies with slightly worrying enthusiasm. “There are so many devices to assist you, we can try them all. We shall buy a cedar-cherry cane and an aspen-dogwood cane and a folding cane and a four-footed cane-“

“Actually,” Zuko intervenes before Uncle gets his heart set on blowing all their money, “I know what I want. Just a walking stick. A pole, maybe with flaring bases so it’s steady...and made of metal.”

Uncle strokes his chin. “Hmm. Would you be tired, lugging a block of metal all day?”

“It doesn’t matter. I want something fireproof,” Zuko answers, “and useful in a fight.”

“Then it is settled.” He claps his hands, easily persuaded. “Only...do we use a steel pole or an iron pole or a copper pole or a bronze pole…”

/

It hurts to lie even by omission. But while he trusts Uncle with his life, he doesn’t trust him enough to _stay._ This is the Dragon of the West, the most ambitious royal the Fire Nation had before his brother decided to steal that title. Though he’s retired, Uncle’s loyalty remains tied to the Fire Nation. Though he dabbles in the other bending disciplines, chattering about the efficiency and elegance of Water Tribe techniques, his heart remains bound to firebending. Zuko will hide his metalbending behind a metaphorical wall, because he doesn’t want to learn where his uncle’s tolerance ends.

(Iroh senses that his nephew holds secrets heavier than any walking stick can be. The boy is too quiet, too serious, with a thousand plans yet not a trace of malice, with a mouth so set in stone it doesn’t seem to remember smiling. But Iroh has experience with both walls and waiting.)

It hurts Zuko, when he packs away his two-handed _dao._ It goes in a trunk with the few other possessions Uncle managed to steal for him- mostly old theater junk that his mother had bought him. He loves those _dao._ He’s tinkered with the blade and the balance until they’re _his,_ until he could pick them out by feel among a hundred identical-looking weapons.

But for now he’s stronger with a plain longsword in his right hand and a massive walking stick in his left. The stick doubles as an excellent club, and he has to be careful not to leave obvious damage as he swings it around. More importantly it lets him perceive the world with a whole new sense. He returns to sparring, more perceptive and deadly than ever. He won’t miss anything ever again.

/

Uncle knocks on his door during a pleasure trip to the South Pole- nowhere near the Water Tribe, they have no intention of causing panic. “Zuko? There was an unusual blast of light nearby that could perhaps have been the Avatar’s work. Would you like to adjust our course and investigate?”

Zuko’s sharpening his sword with a whetstone- back, forth, back, forth- partly for comfort, mostly for show. Glancing up at Uncle, he shrugs. “It’s just the celestial lights. Why bother?”


	3. Chapter 3

...so the Avatar’s back now.

Zuko flirts with the idea of chasing him down. He allows himself one hour of wishful thinking, of imagining the parades and the warm hug his sister will grant him and the golden headpiece his father will personally place back on his head if Zuko manages to capture him. Then he shuts down the dreaming and proceeds with reality.

He could show up with the Earth King’s head on a plate, it still wouldn’t get the Fire Lord’s respect.

Whenever the _Wani_ makes port, Zuko makes a half-hearted show of asking for news of the Avatar, technically fulfilling his mandate. He chuckles under his breath as he learns about the Fire Nation champion who’s _actually_ trying to find the Avatar. Apparently, Admiral Zhao’s put all his resources into the search, and for his trouble he’s been concussed by a boomerang, dropped down a well, half-drowned in fine perfume, and robbed by pirates.

Every time he hears the latest episode of Zhao’s saga, Zuko shakes his head and gives thanks to the spirits that he’s nowhere _near_ that embarrassing.

He throws glances at his uncle, wondering when he’ll be scolded by the old general for dereliction of duty. But Uncle stays quiet. When the lecture finally comes, it’s delivered instead by an envoy from Zhao, who’s planning some sort of maneuver at the North Pole. To this end, the envoy admonishes Zuko for his prior inaction and announces how he’ll be making up for it.

Zhao’s unceremoniously commandeered all of Zuko’s sailors, plus the ship to go with it.

“The Admiral also requests your presence, General Iroh.”

Zuko can’t help it, the way he flinches and turns too quickly to look at his uncle. He’ll face it head-on, he’ll handle this final abandonment with all the courage he can muster-

“Retired general,” Uncle says serenely, before taking another sip of his jasmine.

Somehow, that’s all there is to it.

/

“Why?” Zuko asks once they’re alone, back on the open ocean. They’re sailing to the colony port where Zhao’s assembling his fleet, deep in what used to be the Earth Kingdom.

He says it calmly, but Iroh can hear a lump like a pebble lodged in his nephew’s throat.

“I waited six hundred days at Ba Sing Se,” he says. “For you, I will wait longer. As long as you need to find your way.”

“...Why?”

Iroh glances up from his tea and sees Zuko’s eyes looking back. Even with the wound, they’re a pure molten gold, bright not only with the promise of magic but with a sweetness too rare in the line of Sozin.

“I look at you,” Iroh murmurs, “and I see Lu Ten.”

He cannot guess why Zuko’s gaze falls immediately, why his eyes turn bright with tears.

/

Zuko remembers Lu Ten- a talented firebender, with jasmine cookies always hidden in his pockets and a smile always hidden, waiting to spring forth. Mother said he didn’t have an ounce of deceit in his body, and that made him unique in their family. No matter how he might wish it, Zuko’s nothing like him.

It hurts. It hurts not to tell his uncle about his bending, bizarre and limited as it is. If he had to bet, Uncle wouldn’t judge him. He would, at worst, treat Zuko as a new curio in his collection. Zuko thinks it’s safe to tell Uncle. 

(But he’s bet wrong before, and this isn’t a risk he can take. Not unless he knows for sure.)

It occurs to Zuko that even if Uncle turned on him, condemned him as the aberration that he is, he could survive. He can forge armor and knives and swords on command, he could fight long enough to run. Death isn’t what scares him, so much as the fact that he might lose his last tie to his old home. 

Call it weakness, but he can’t cut the Fire Nation out entirely. Not yet.

/

The _Wani_ deposits them on the shore of a Fire Nation colony, a peninsula where everyone but the soldiers looks down at the ground all the time and earthbending is strictly forbidden. Zuko stands with a walking stick and a pared-down pile of luggage- he wanted to throw out all the theater stuff, but Uncle had insisted on keeping it- and watches the warship disappear into the mist.

(It’s dishonorable, being robbed of his crew like this. Still the shame’s overwhelmed by _relief_ at solid ground, even if it doesn’t quite feel like Caldera’s soil.)

(He left behind his Fire Nation tapestries without a second thought.)

“Where to now, Prince Zuko?” 

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” he says. He’s quiet, but the words bare more than he wanted.

“You have faced your challenges with the noblest sort of dignity,” Uncle tells him. “A stroke of Ozai’s brush cannot take that nobility away from you.”

Zuko laughs, not in joy but disbelief. “How else could I face my fate? Ranting and screaming at the heavens?”

“I would not blame you if you did.”

(It’d be a lie, if Zuko said the thought wasn’t tempting sometimes. But he’s never indulged in frequent outbursts, never given in to the irrepressible passion of flame. He presses down his every theatrical impulse, begging it to wait another day.)

He steals a glance at Uncle. “You know, without the warship, it’s easier to travel in the Earth Kingdom.”

He says it cautiously, waiting, listening and watching for any sign of displeasure. But his uncle simply beams wide at him.

“Perfect! I have heard many stories of Omashu’s rare blue lotus tea...”

/

It’s easy, slipping from Fire Nation territory into the Earth Kingdom. They’re eyed warily but left alone in the colonies, once the soldiers get close to make out their old general (and their disfigured ex-prince, but they always say it’s the general they recognize), but with one step across the border they’re foreigners in an enemy land.

One step, and Zuko feels _safer_ than he has since the turtleduck pond.

/

They can’t get into Omashu. There’s an outbreak of Pentapox, a fellow traveler informs them apologetically. No one’s allowed in or out of the gate.

“Pentapox?” Zuko frowns, puzzled. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“I think I have,” Uncle says warily. “Black pockmarks all over your tongue, and shooting joint pain, and worst of all- a complete loss of taste! Imagine, nephew, if you could never discern the notes of a fine tea again...”

Zuko can’t resist getting a little closer to the city. The roads are safely deserted, thanks to a carefully followed quarantine. His heart jumps a little at the thought; he’d always heard Omashu was a place of free spirits and eccentrics, but even here people care enough for each other to quarantine of their own free will-

He reaches the mountaintop, and his stomach plummets. 

“Ah,” Uncle sighs beside him. “I wondered when Ozai would press his advantage.”

Zuko can see all the marvels of Omashu, as recorded in the scrolls he used to sneak out of the library- the towering city carved into a mountainside by ancient masters of earthbending, the rock chutes forming the world’s most efficient delivery system, the ramps and pyramids and columns together creating the grandest work of art he’s ever seen.

He can see the Fire Nation’s flame, a stark black-and-red tapestry draped over the front gate.

For the first time in his sixteen years, Zuko feels like burning something.

/

Three years. Sixteen years, depending on how he’s counting. He’s spent his whole life hearing how the whole world rebels and fights and _cries out_ against Fire Nation control, but he’s never _listened._

“Are you all right, Prince Zuko?”

He replies with a nod, newly aware that he’s riding beside the Dragon of the West. Being deemed “prince” rankles in a new way, tonight.

/

They wind up in Gaoling instead.

They find a room in an inn easily. The walls and floors are stone, and so is most of the furniture. It’s decorated with warm greens and sprightly yellows. Most importantly, there’s a box on the windowsill, filled with tall, bold yellow flowers that draw Zuko right to them.

“Ah, the helianthus,” Uncle says fondly, because of _course_ he recognizes random plants on sight. “Also known as ‘sunflowers,’ because they follow the sun through the sky every day.”

On some odd instinct, Zuko reaches forth and plunges his hands into damp, sun-kissed dirt. It just feels _right._

They decide on their false names- Lee and Mushi- and their backstories- fresh transplants from the colonies- and head into the market for supplies. Thanks to experience, Zuko insists on holding onto the wallet. He follows his uncle through three different teahouses- the first rejected for a poor menu, the second for a watery cup of oolong- and then, surprisingly, into a blacksmith’s workshop.

“What are you looking for?” Zuko asks.

“Nothing for me. But perhaps you will find something that _you_ need.”

Zuko looks over the offerings. Mostly they’re standard weapons he’s already practiced fashioning himself, however crudely, from the _Wani’s_ walls. There’s one weapon of interest, a pair of hooked swords that catch him off-guard, but he sets them aside to watch the smith at work. The smoke and soot can’t faze him after a lifetime around firebenders, and so he comes as close as he politely can and stares, hypnotized by the way she mixes metal and shapes it with her molds and heats it to a fiery red.

Uncle doesn’t interrupt him, though he stays a little too long, fascinated. He finally has to pull himself away, emerging into sunlight with a long exhale.

“Remarkable, how even the most unbending steel was once cast into its shape,” Uncle Iroh remarks.

Zuko genuinely puts a minute’s effort into dissecting the moral of that proverb, but he’s distracted once more by a barker outside a massive stone stadium.

“Earth Rumble 7! Since our prior champions are out on medical leave, we’ve got a whole new slate of contenders! Tickets are double price to fund hospital bills...and to celebrate these brand-new earthbenders and their brand-new techniques! See a new era of earthbending history unfolding tonight!”

Zuko doesn’t _mean_ to rubberneck as he walks by. He certainly doesn’t mean to get persuaded by an objectively terrible sales pitch, but for some reason he stops and squints at the ticket prices.

“Uncle,” he observes, “look, there’s a 20% discount if we buy two. Why don’t we-”

He trails off as Uncle’s face goes pale.

“I’m afraid-” he frowns, pain flickering across his face with perhaps a hint of rage- “I cannot find much entertainment in shows of earthbending, even five years after…”

Zuko swallows hard. 

(They say Lu Ten was _ruined_ once the earthbenders got through with him. They say he bore more resemblance to a grapemelon that exploded from overwatering than a human body. Uncle knew him only by the crown.)

Uncle presses his eyes shut, racked by a sudden shiver. Still, he adds, “But I certainly would not stop you if you wished to see-”

“No,” Zuko says in a hurry. “No. It just seemed like a good deal, forget I said anything.”

/

They leave Gaoling with a pair of legally obtained, properly licensed ostrich-horses, and Zuko finds a way to ride his while the walking stick drags informatively on the ground. He keeps one fist curled around the pole as the other holds tight to the reins. The pole keeps him grounded while, with his right eye, he drinks in landscapes like none he’s ever seen. The mountains subside and give way to plains full of golden wheat and oats and other crops, their bounty stretching to the horizon. In Caldera, by contrast, it sometimes seemed the world ended at the rim of the city’s crater or perhaps at the seashore.

It makes his heart dance, trekking mile after mile surrounded by grand, stable, solid ground.

They stop at villages and buy what they need. Zuko wishes traitorously that the food was spicier, and Uncle hides grimaces at the tasteless tea, and there’s dust everywhere, even in the best-kept shops. But every merchant and waiter serves them with a smile, with simple, quiet courtesy, and Zuko prefers their company to all the obsequious flattery of the servants he grew up with. He tries to mirror their greetings and bows, quiet and simple himself, and though he’s awkward they reply with smiles of approval, not mockery. Uncle- apparently insensible to the irony of touring the kingdom he previously terrorized- befriends people in every town.

There’s news of the Avatar- a story about him and Azula _sledding_ _down Omashu’s mail chutes._ It’s patently absurd. He and Uncle take one look at each other and shake their heads, dismissing it as a tall tale. 

Zuko listens to every story people have to tell him about the outside world, no matter how ridiculous. He listens, waiting for the news to make sense again. 

Wary of the heat, he and Uncle follow rivers deep into the Earth Kingdom. Uncle’s spending manages to at last bankrupt them- but he spends the last silver coin on a piece of sparkly, jasmine-flavored Jennamite candy that even Zuko admits is worth it. Zuko considers bending them some more money, but Uncle saves him from a life of counterfeiting. The owner of the general store happens to mention the roof needs retiling, and with a few calculated smiles Uncle wins Zuko the job. 

If the rumors are even half-true, Azula’s touring the Earth Kingdom in her palanquin while Zuko’s baking on a rooftop, figuring out how exactly hammers work. But once he does, sensing the metal nails even when he can’t quite see them, he wouldn’t change places for the world.

He finishes replacing the tiles before sundown. He even bends away a few chips so there’ll be no holes for rain to sneak through. Delighted by his work, his boss recommends him for a few roofs down the street, and Zuko picks up work in the next town by shoveling coal, and in the next by hauling buckets of water to a cistern. Uncle never mocks his newfound affinity for manual labor- it helps that it’s financing their journey, but he seems genuinely accepting- and Zuko doesn’t feel embarrassed either. It’s _easier_ for him to do these tasks, because he’s bending his way through them all, and these are decent people who pay him honestly, with generous wages they state upfront. Sure, he was born a prince, but how could he find shame in using his powers to help them?

He’s less concerned about his pride than his practical challenges- manual labor tends to demand two hands. He carries his pole up onto the roofs just fine, but it’s awkward carrying two buckets along with a walking stick. When he's shoveling, he winds up ditching the stick entirely, resigned to stumbling around. He _could_ manage a metal shovel with one hand, but not without attracting more attention than he wants right now. 

/

He contemplates the problem until they land at a mining town by the river, and Uncle gives one of his special smiles to a rotund grandmother, and though Zuko wants to facepalm she’s charmed enough to invite them to her home. She says her name is Amrita. Uncle says his name is Mushi. She and Uncle trade proverbs back and forth in a manner old people must think is flirtatious. Then she throws _Zuko_ a flirtatious wink while they’re crossing a bridge over rushing rapids, and Zuko considers bending a hole in the bridge just to flee.

But he doesn’t. He just listens as she explains how her family’s spent decades prospecting for precious metals, how she’s brought them to this stretch of the river because of rumors of gold in the silt.

“Have you found the treasure you seek?” Uncle asks.

“Still searching,” Amrita says, sharing a knowing smile with him. “We’ve spent months panning for gold in different spots, but we’ve gotten only dirt so far.”

“What happens-” Uncle won’t appreciate the third-wheel interrupting, but Zuko’s curious- “if there _isn’t_ gold?”

“We’ll move on. I’ve been wrong before,” she replies without hesitating. 

“But,” Zuko says, unable to stop himself, “wouldn’t your family hold it against you?”

She pauses, fixing him with an oddly piercing gaze. “We all take wrong turns on our path. Family follows you the whole way anyway.”

Zuko definitely does not steal a glance at his uncle, plodding reliably beside him.

/

Turns out the wink wasn’t flirtatious.

Turns out the wink was instead evil and devious, the mark of a mastermind matchmaker.

Amrita leads him through the gate to her home and instantly introduces him to her granddaughter Isha, a girl about Zuko’s age. She’s got bright eyes and warm brown skin and a burn scar on her left arm and a false gold tooth, up front and center. That tooth immediately snags Zuko’s interest, because he could really _use_ something like that; it’s a way to make sure that even if he gets thrown into a wood or stone prison he’s never entirely without metal. Anything can be a weapon if you’re determined enough-

“- and Lee, since you’re both from out of town, you are the perfect person to join her tonight, if you might be interested?”

Zuko definitely missed multiple words, but he takes in Isha’s look of hope, and Uncle’s look of hope-cum-desperation and nods. “Nothing would make me happier.”

/

Nothing could make Zuko less happy.

In his fit of daydreaming, he agreed to escort Isha to a _town party._ Biggest party of the year, according to Amrita. Mercifully, it’s not as stifling and pretentious as a palace soirée. It’s being held in a large stone silo, decorated with strings of multi-colored lanterns whose lights warm the golden wood. In the corner, musicians are playing a lively tune on stringed instruments- sort of like the _pipa_ and _erhu,_ though Zuko doesn’t recognize the exact shapes- and there’s a table on the end stacked high with baskets of food. 

Zuko fidgets beside Isha. Uncle lovingly bullied him into wearing a navy cloak sewn with rhinestones, a genuine costume replica from his old _Love Amongst the Dragons_ phase; he supposes he should count himself lucky Uncle didn’t insist on the matching mask. He’s not sure whether it makes things better or worse that Isha looks genuinely _nice_ beside him, in an embroidered green tunic-dress and loose pants with a sheer scarf wrapped around her neck. Uncle and Amrita have dressed up too, canoodling on the other side of the hall and sneaking what they must think are subtle looks their way.

Isha breaks the silence. “So.”

Zuko replies the only way he knows how: “Yeah.”

“Sorry you got strong-armed into this.”

“It’s my fault, I wasn’t listening to your grandmother talk,” he says too quickly before thinking about how that sounds. “Not because of her! Just because of your tooth.”

She blinks at him. “That’s...nice.”

“I mean. Because of how lovely you look and how the metal complements the, uh, brilliance of your eyes-“

Isha cuts him off, snorting. “Hey, I didn’t hear anything your uncle said either. I was looking at your scar.”

“...oh.”

“It’s cool,” she says with a shrug. “You don’t have to say anything, but I’m assuming you’re a war hero who fought the Fire Nation valiantly.”

“Your tooth’s cool too,” he offers. “And I’m not just making that up now, I swear.”

She grins wide at him, gold tooth sparkling. Then they fade into silence again.

“So,” Zuko says this time, for variety.

“Can we dance? It’d make my grandmother smile for a month.”

The floor’s filled up with pairs of dancers, weaving in and out of geometric shapes. Zuko frowns for a moment, trying to deduce the patterns. It’s all based on squares, he realizes. Sets of four couples, one for each element or maybe each season. And he never danced in public in the Fire Nation but it’s not _hard,_ he’d twirl around with Mother after every show they saw and he’s learned a thousand poses in his training. Folk dances should be simple by comparison.

But he watches the dancers whirl close to each other, holding hands as they glide over a worryingly uneven stone floor, and Zuko can’t do that. On instinct, his hand clenches on his walking stick.

“Oh,” Isha groans. “Oh, spirits, I didn’t realize-“

“I need a moment.” Zuko rushes abruptly from the silo, back to Amrita’s home and into his guest room. He flings open the box of theater trinkets, passing over programs and masks to find a pair of shoes. They were too big for him to fill when his mother bought them, but maybe they’ll fit now-

He tries them on, and there’s still a gaping space where his toes should go. He scurries down to the house’s supply cabinet and pulls out a couple pans made of aluminum, and he siphons off enough metal from the bottom to mold himself insoles. He jams the insoles into the shoes and tries them again.

Perfect.

He gives an experimental shuffle, and the shoes go _clack_ against the ground. They’re dancing shoes, from when his mother snuck him out to a traveling variety show where tap dancers made their own music, wearing metal-bottomed shoes that tapped out a beat every time they struck the floor. Zuko closes his eyes and feels the metal plates underneath, below his heels and the balls of his feet. One clench of his fist, and they poke upwards to meet the insoles.

He puts down his walking stick and stamps his sole on the ground. _Clack._

The vibrations travel upwards from the ground through to his feet and finally to his brain. Even when he closes his eyes, he can feel everything- the walls and the bed and the open trunk. 

Furrowing his brow in concentration, he lifts his foot again. He can predict the collision of his foot with the wooden floor before it happens. He can bend the metal to dampen the sound.

This time, when his foot meets the ground, there’s silence.

He races back to the barn, abandoning his walking stick. He bursts in, breathless and flushed, and finds Isha with her face buried in Amrita’s shoulder as Uncle shakes his head nearby. Zuko weaves through the crowd to get to her.

“Isha? Sorry, I didn’t have the right shoes, I didn’t mean…” He swallows hard as she looks up at him, face bright with hope. “Would you like to dance?”

She accepts.

He’s bad at first, but she’s worse, and the first time they tumble into a heap they wind up laughing about it, and another couple stops to help them up and explain the patterns. They’re accepted into the dance easily, managing their own corner of the square and crossing into others when the pattern lets them. The sprightly strings animate the room like a heartbeat, and it settles into Zuko’s core, along with the symmetries of the choreography that he feels firsthand, through the metal at his feet. By the end of the night even Uncle and Amrita join in the dance and no one bats an eye. These Earth Kingdom festivities are open not just to young professionals who’ve trained all their lives but to anyone and everyone in town.

The Fire Nation could never hold a candle to this.

/

They come home past midnight, Isha and Zuko guiding their elders home with firm hands after one too many cups of punch. Zuko settles Uncle on his divan and then slips back out, still wearing his dancing shoes. He takes a pan down to the river and reaches out with senses he can’t name, seeking flecks of gold deep in the soil.

The day afterwards, Isha finds an unsigned note folded up at the front door: “There’s treasure on the far shore, at the bend in the river.”

Zuko imagines their smiles when they find the first bit of gold in their pans, but he doesn’t stay to see them. He’s miles down the road by then, eyes fixed on the horizon, waiting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: Zuko stops avoiding the main plot. (Credit to badmeanbadger for that delightful phrasing.)


	4. Chapter 4

Zuko plods into the village at sunset with Uncle beside him. It’s smaller than the other towns they’ve visited, and the people immediately glare their way, suspicious of outsiders. Zuko keeps his head down. Even Uncle doesn’t attempt to make friends or charm the local merchants, just orders food for them and their animals.

Zuko tips his hat down and closes his eyes. He doesn’t need the blinding sunlight to see, not when he can feel things with his walking stick.

(Though he’s put the dancing shoes away for now, he hasn’t forgotten them.)

He senses light feet pattering down the alley next to him. Then there’s a squishy-sounding crack across the road and a giggle nearby. Leaning against a wood post, Zuko cracks his good eye open as a crowd of burly Earth Kingdom soldiers gets up and advances. 

“You throwing eggs at us, strangers?”

“No,” says Zuko as Uncle turns around.

“You see who did throw it?”

“No.” It helps that it’s the truth- he didn’t “see” anything.

“That your favorite word, ‘no’?”

“No,” Zuko says, just as Uncle intervenes with a placatory smile: “An egg holds all the promise of a new world. Neither I nor my nephew would do it the dishonor of discarding it so carelessly-“

The leader of the pack cuts him off with a menacing step forward. “Sounds like a lot of words to say you’re guilty.”

Uncle throws his hands up, a plea for peace. The lead bully jerks his hammer off his belt. Zuko frowns, clenching his good eye shut again.

The hammer slips out of the man’s hand and lands squarely on his toes.

He yowls, introducing Zuko to a thesaurus’s worth of Earth Kingdom curse words, and wrenches the hammer off his foot and limps away, all his comrades laughing loud. Zuko shoots a glance at his Uncle, who’s suppressing a chuckle of his own.

Zuko allows himself a quirk of the lip.

“Perhaps,” Uncle says, once they’ve gotten their supplies, “we might consider traveling onwards today. A leaf must know when to leave the branch.”

“Hey, mister!” A scrawny kid darts out of nowhere, running straight to Zuko. “Thanks for not ratting us out. I’ll take you to my house, my mom can make you dinner-“

“We already have food,” Zuko points out. Admittedly, the two bowls Uncle’s holding look full of warmed pond water, but he’s not keen on staying in this town longer than he needs to.

“Aw, but her food is _actually good.”_

Uncle shoots him a pleading glance. Zuko scowls back in warning.

“She’s got fresh chicken-pig meatballs and flatbread and-“

“And a fresh cup of tea?” prompts Uncle.

“Yeah,” the kid says, now wrinkling up his nose, “if you like that kinda thing.”

With that, Zuko loses the battle.

/

The soldiers crash back in the next morning. Zuko tightens his hand around his walking stick in preparation for trouble, but he’s not the one they’re here for.

The kid’s dad, Gansu, stands against them. “What do you want, Gow?”

Gow gives a chilling smile. “Just thought someone ought to tell you that your son's battalion got captured. You boys hear what the Fire Nation did with their last group of Earth Kingdom prisoners?”

One of the other soldiers answers, like some twisted game of call-and-response. “Dressed 'em up in Fire Nation uniforms and put 'em on the front line unarmed, the way I heard it. Then they just watched.”

“That is propaganda,” Uncle interrupts. “Not a grain of truth.”

No one else seems to believe him. _Zuko’s_ not sure he believes him.

The soldiers leave in a better mood than they came. Zuko steals a look at the kid, slumped over miserably.

“Your brother will come back,” Uncle says in his most comforting tone, kneeling down to his height. “You’ll see.”

Zuko crosses his arms. “How do you know that?” 

Hearing his sharp tone, Uncle’s head jerks up.

“Because I'm going to the front,” Gansu declares.” I'm going to find Sen Su and bring him back.”

He steps away from his wife’s embrace, no doubt to gather supplies for the journey. Zuko remains where he is, looking down at Uncle without speaking. Eyes narrowed, Uncle stares back at him steadily, before at last bowing his head.

“Permit an old man to join you,” he says when Gansu returns. “I have some knowledge of the Fire Nation army’s protocols; I may be of assistance in negotiating a release. Perhaps, nephew, you might stay here to protect these people in our absence?”

Zuko understands what Uncle’s not saying. The Dragon of the West still holds great power in the military. A disgraced ex-prince, less so.

After a moment, Zuko bows. “I will wait for you here.”

/

Zuko finishes tiling the roof. He feeds the animals. He bends the rust out of the water pipes, and he gives Lee a quick lesson on using a longsword- after dulling the blade, it wouldn’t do to give a kid something genuinely sharp- and he waits for Uncle and Gansu and Sen Su to return.

Spring comes, the days slowly warming further. Zuko figures out how plows work and turns up the soil. With a little regret, he realizes he’ll probably be gone by the time the seeds are sown.

Then the heat wave hits. 

Zuko barely notices- he’s simply thankful it’s dry, without Caldera’s smothering humidity- but the locals worry. It’s a blazing, hazy heat, and they mutter about fires catching in the fields. Eventually the mayor of the village calls a meeting.

“It’s not safe to stay out in these temperatures,” she announces. “We’ll be heading down to the tunnels for a couple days.”

As the rest of the crowd breathes a sigh of relief, Zuko frowns in confusion. Then a team of earthbenders emerges from the crowd and, in unison, stomps their feet.

A massive hole opens up in the ground. Another collective stomp, another hole.

Zuko stares, strangely transfixed by this display of earthbending.

(He knows where the third hole will open before it does. It must be a lucky guess.)

In a flurry, the town and its animals migrate down into a maze of tunnels already buried deep below the dust, already prepared for heat waves just like this one. Zuko wanders down for a second, into the welcoming, refreshing cool air, into a sophisticated structure that feels far more impressive than the town above. In wonder, he runs his hands along the smooth tunnel walls, oddly elated.

Then he finds out the holes will be closed in a couple minutes, to preserve the cold air. 

He can’t stay.

He returns to the now deserted farm, waiting for Uncle to return. He _could_ practice metalbending, but the heat makes him lazy. So he just sits in the shade, making sure both he and his ostrich-horse stay hydrated, and runs his hands through the dusty soil. He goes into town the next day, just in case something happens. It’s dead quiet, looking for all the world like an abandoned ghost town.

He comes back the next day, waiting for something, _anything_ to happen, and spots a small figure in saffron-orange, waiting in the middle of a road.

“Hello!”

When there’s no response, Zuko comes closer. It’s a young boy, sagging against a walking stick, with yellow trim on his clothes and…

A blue arrow on his bald head.

Zuko stops in his tracks. Closes his eyes and breathes in deep.

“Hello,” he says, trotting forward with an awkward wave. “Lee here.”

This time the boy wearily turns and cranes his head up at him. He’s _young,_ thirteen at the most, with deep shadows smudged under his eyes. 

“I’m Aang,” he says after a second.

Zuko rolls his own metal walking stick in his hands. He’d win, if he decided to listen to his father, if he decided to stand and fight or maybe just ambush the Avatar.

Aang.

A kid with a walking stick and a sack of fur, for some reason, who’s currently blinking up at Zuko owlishly.

“What are you doing here?” 

Aang gestures vaguely down the road. “There was an evil tractor chasing the fur, and then three girls got out, and I don’t know who they are but one of them pokes people and they lose their bending, and one of them has way too many knives, I don’t know where she keeps them all, and their leader shoots _crazy blue fire!”_

Unfortunately, Zuko understood all of that except the fur part.

“You’re the Avatar,” Zuko ventures, waiting for a nod of confirmation. “I’ve heard that the Fire Nation’s pursuing you. The leader sounds like Princess Azula, one of the deadliest firebenders alive. Her blue fire’s the stuff of legend,” he says, with only a little resentment. “You should probably know she also makes lightning.”

“Yeah,” Aang sighs, crumpling a little more and leaning his forehead against his stick. “I found _that_ out last night.”

“She’s trying to capture you for the Fire Nation.” Zuko frowns. “But you said they’re chasing the fur.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“...why don’t you leave the bag here and run?”

He shakes his head. “I have to face her. If I can’t and she’s just the princess, how am I supposed to beat Fire Lord Ozai?”

His eyes go impossibly wide, and Zuko gulps. Try as he might, he can’t imagine this sapling of a kid murdering the Fire Lord. It doesn’t feel like his destiny.

“Here’s an idea,” Zuko murmurs. “Why don’t you at least come in and rest? Unless you also plan on fighting the Fire Lord while sleepwalking.”

Aang chuckles.

Zuko offers him a hand and hauls him up. “Come on.”

The second they enter Gansu’s barn, Aang collapses in the hay, completely unconscious. In the calm, Zuko laces up his dancing shoes in exchange for his walking stick. He scrounges up a suit of armor from pieces left by the soldiers, and he pulls out his old twin _dao._

Aang sleeps in the hay, and Zuko sits on the threshold, spinning his swords. Waiting.

/

There’s smoke from the village.

For a second, Zuko hopes it’s just spontaneous combustion from the heatwave, but he’s disillusioned by the following snap of thunder.

“Aang-“

“On it.” Aang strides forth with his walking stick, looking far more awake and slightly more intimidating. He shakes his stick, which suddenly fans out into a glider, and takes one more look at Zuko. “By the way, nice shoes!”

Then he soars into the air, right towards the sound of Azula’s temper tantrum.

Zuko waits a moment, watching him spiral through the sky.

Then he pulls on an old blue opera mask and takes off running. 

He sprints straight towards a firefight, towards Mai, Ty Lee and Azula focusing all their power on Aang. Zuko considers diving straight in, but he steps down an alley instead. Hidden by a wall, he pushes his senses towards Mai, who’s carrying enough weaponry for an army as usual. Zuko reaches out to her steel-tipped arrows and her throwing knives, and he subtly shifts their points of balance just an inch off where they should be. He peeks again and hears a vicious curse, as Mai throws a fistful of knives at Aang and they all whiz right past him.

Then there’s Ty Lee, gracefully leaping along the shingled ridge of a roof. Zuko brushes his hands together, and a shingle slips out of place when she next makes contact. With a squeal, she tumbles off the roof into a bright pink heap.

Two threats eliminated, Zuko watches Azula and Aang. He fights with the grit and speed one would expect of the Avatar, but his repertoire of tricks seems limited to airbending. It’s enough to kill though, if he chooses, and as his little sister and the Avatar trade fireballs and blasts of air Zuko realizes he doesn’t really want either of them to die.

That’s inconvenient.

He glances around, trying to imagine some way to wade in and broker peace. His daydream gets cut off when Azula lifts her hands to emit a cone of blue fire and falls flat on her face instead.

“Need help, Twinkletoes?”

Zuko pokes his head out and sees three new figures- a young man and woman in blue, and a girl striding forth in proud green. She stamps her foot again and emits a massive blast through the earth, tossing Azula into the air with a brand-new stone pillar, and Zuko can’t feel that coming, can’t feel anything through his shoes anymore. This girl’s earthbending is grand and noisy and completely _deafening._ Zuko leaps back fast as he can to get away from it, shoes clacking loud as he gives up on metalbending. He nearly kicks them off, just to escape the overload of sensation, the feeling that all his bones have been struck by individual hammers. He can’t process anything with that racket going on underground, he can’t even _think._

It’s why Zuko doesn’t notice Mai creeping up behind him on his left, raising a plank of wood, and swiftly knocking him out.

/

Toph rolls up to this rinky-dink village, ready to smash some Fire Nation heads, and is slightly sad to find that one girl’s already down. But Zappy and Gloomy are still up and causing chaos, and that’ll have to do. Zappy’s trying to scorch Aang right now, and Gloomy’s creeping down an alleyway for some mysterious stealth attack that Toph will have to worry about later. The town seems otherwise empty, so Toph doesn’t have to worry about casualties as she kicks the ground, sending a massive wave of power that manifests under Zappy’s feet, toppling her over. As she stomps her foot and creates a magnificent trampoline out of rock, tossing Zappy high into the air-

There’s a weird _clack-clacking_ down the alleyway _._ Footfalls from someone who, somehow, had escaped Toph’s notice until now.

Then there’s a magnificent _clank_ as that someone falls forward into the roadway, apparently in full armor.

So that’s...weird. Toph ignores it for now though, because Aang’s fighting off Gloomy and Zappy at once, and then Katara and Sokka show up and it’s four-on-two but still dangerous. Toph chases Gloomy down an alley and buries her under a mountain of rock. When she gets back, Katara and Sokka and Aang have Zappy cornered against a stone wall. 

“I’m done,” she says. “I know when I’m beaten. You got me.”

Toph digs her heel into the ground, trying to figure out if that’s a lie. 

“A princess surrenders with honor.”

Weird- Zappy’s being honest.

/

Zuko awakens to a blurry world. After a second of concentrated scowling, he can make out four figures- Aang, the earthbender and two people in blue- all clustered around Azula.

She has her hands up. “A princess surrenders with honor.”

Yeah, that’s definitely a lie.

Zuko tries to push himself up and crashes right back down, the world swimming. But the other four drop their hands, like they believe her, and Azula sweeps them with a calculating glance, like she’s decided to throw fire and is just picking out who to kill.

Zuko lets out a frustrated huff into the ground, his whole body shaking with the effort. Dust flies back up and tickles his nose.

When he turns his face away, trying not to sneeze, he sees a flicker of blue flame obscured by a dust cloud.

_BOOM._

The town shakes from a giant explosion. 

“What happened?” Aang exclaims. With one wave of an arm, he clears the cloud of smoke, revealing an empty spot where Azula used to be.

“When a spark hits a cloud of particularly fine powder,” the boy in blue declares between hacking coughs, “it can cause an explosion.”

Zuko knew that, on some subconscious level. He remembers one of his tutors explaining that in a tactics lesson.

“Nice,” the earthbender says with a smirk. “Quick thinking, Twinkletoes.”

Aang- Twinkletoes?- looks at her in confusion. “I didn’t make the dust cloud. You did!”

Her smirk slides into a frown. “No, I definitely didn’t.”

“Then where did it come from?” says the girl in blue.

Simultaneously, all four of them turn to look at Zuko.

He pushes himself up and removes his mask, after checking that Azula, Mai and Ty Lee are too far away to feel. “What are you looking at me for?”

The earthbender frowns harder at him. “No offense, because I figure there aren’t a lot of masters out here in the middle of nowhere, but you should probably get a new teacher.”

Zuko gets to his feet and takes a few steps forward. “No offense, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She frowns even harder. “What I’m talking about is the fact that you have the weirdest earthbending technique I’ve ever felt.”

“...I’m not an earthbender.”

/

Toph scowls. She can hear this guy’s voice, it’s getting louder so he must be getting closer, but she can’t _feel_ him. His steps are muffled so her toes can’t see them. With a start, she realizes he’s earthbending the sound away somehow, muffling his effect on the dirt, like he’s purposefully trying to screw her over.

It fits. The way he bent the dust cloud was the weirdest ever. Earthbending’s supposed to be loud, unmistakable, a way of stamping yourself into the world so no one can deny you exist. But he’s so soft and precious with his bending, she didn’t even notice it at the time.

“...I’m not an earthbender.”

She can’t see him through the ground, which means she can't tell with her feet that he’s lying. But _obviously_ he’s lying.

“Right,” she drawls back. “It was the Spirit of Convenient Dust that blessed us with that cloud.”

“Maybe,” he says, sounding bizarrely earnest about it. “I’m _not_ an earthbender!”

Toph sighs. She thought she was the only person who had to hide her earthbending skill- outside the colonies where earthbending’s banned, at least- but maybe this guy has reasons to keep it secret too.

“Okay,” she shrugs, backing down against every instinct in her body. “Maybe we just got lucky.”

“Are you injured?” Katara steps towards him, pulling out the water from her flask.

“...maybe a bit concussed,” the supposed-not-earthbender says.

“Can I heal it for you?”

After a moment, the guy gives a gruff yes.

They regroup, tending to various injuries. After checking that the Fire Nation girls aren’t skulking nearby, Sokka immediately slumps over to sleep. Toph tries to snuff out fires and repair the buildings they damaged, but she feels the stranger’s gaze on her, like a brand on the back.

_“What?”_

“Nothing,” he mutters.

“Thanks for helping out, Lee,” Aang chirps. “This could’ve gone a lot worse without you.”

“...It’s an honor to help the Avatar.”

“If you’re traveling,” Aang adds, “maybe we can go together for a little bit?”

“I can’t. Sorry. I’m still waiting for a few other people, but…”

“But what?” 

He pauses. “Good luck with killing the Fire Lord.”

His husky voice takes on an odd warmth, like he really, really means it.

Aang, Katara, Sokka and Toph pile onto Appa and wave good-bye to Lee. Once they’re safely out of earshot, Toph snorts. “Oh man, he’s _totally_ an earthbender.”


	5. Chapter 5

The town emerges from the tunnels to find their main road half-wrecked. Zuko tells them it’s the fault of Fire Nation agents who he had to run out of town, and he shows them the lizard-mongoose tracks to prove it. Though he refuses all attempts at payment- “it was just luck I was there”- he accepts their thanks with a rare smile.

Returning with Gansu and Sen Su, Uncle hears the story out with a curious expression on his face.

“Is it true, nephew?”

Zuko replies while sharpening his  _ dao. _ “No deaths. I just scared them a little.”

He can’t bring himself to look up.

He can feel Uncle contemplating him, like maybe his newest secret’s stamped across his brow. But all he says is, “Do you need a few days more to rest, and recover from your battle?”

“I’m fine to go.” Zuko’s eyes flick up, molten gold. “Actually, I was wondering if we could head to Ba Sing Se.”

/

Zuko’s not an earthbender. He wasn’t born that lucky. He’s a metalbender, a discolored thread in the tapestry of history, a warped monster who was lucky to be born.

But for a second he imagines,  _ what if. _

Metal comes from the earth. He’s always felt an affinity for dirt, for dust and sand and rock. He’s always felt safest on solid ground. It’d make its own odd sort of sense.

Zuko wonders,  _ what now. _

If he’s an earthbender, he needs other earthbenders to guide him. Azula had tutors and sparring partners and role models galore; Fire Nation royals never wonder how their firebending works. By contrast, on the off-chance that he really is an earthbender, Zuko has made up everything he knows on sheer desperate instinct. He needs other earthbenders, to see whether he’s one of them, to learn more if he is. And the obvious place to find a crowd of earthbenders is the Earth Kingdom capital: Ba Sing Se.

Zuko asks himself,  _ how _ and  _ why.  _ The obvious answer creeps up on him, slow-burning, rumbling under his skin.

/

In the blink of an eye, they’re on the boat to Ba Sing Se.

Zuko tries to get through the bowl of soup served for dinner, one spoonful at a time, without complaint. But his face wrenches into a grimace anyway after one particularly charred chunk of meat (charred on the outside and yet a raw, awful pink like scar tissue on the inside), and he gives up and tosses the contents overboard.

(Not the bowl though. It’s a smooth round bit of clay, and even if he can’t do anything with it he likes having it in his hands.)

“I did the same thing.”

Zuko spins on his heel, drawn like the needle of a compass towards a smooth, dark voice. 

A young man strides forth in the flashiest makeshift armor Zuko’s ever seen- deep red in parts, jewel-toned blue in others, with mismatched gold and silver spaulders glimmering on his shoulders. Behind him emerge two other figures, likewise clad in in blue and red.

“I’m Jet,” he declares. “And these are my freedom fighters, Smellerbee and Longshot.”

Zuko glances at them and then looks back to Jet, who’s casually leaning against a pole with a wicked curve to his eyebrows and a wicked smile to match. He keeps a long stem- a golden stalk of wild oatrye- caught between his teeth.

The smallest, Smellerbee, says, “Hey.”

Longshot only nods.

Zuko nods in return. “Good to meet you. I’m Lee.”

“Here’s the deal, Lee.” Jet strides right towards him. “I hear the captain’s eating like a king while us refugees have to feed off his scraps. Doesn’t seem fair, does it?”

Silently, Zuko shakes his head.

“What sort of king is he eating like?” Uncle asks from the side. 

“The fat, happy kind.”

Zuko doesn’t have to look to know Uncle’s drooling right now.

Jet returns his attention to Zuko. “You wanna help us  _ liberate _ some food?”

Zuko hesitates. He’s not looking to make trouble in the Earth Kingdom; he can’t get banned from Ba Sing Se before he steps foot inside. Then Uncle’s stomach lets out a thunderous growl.

Zuko sighs. “...I’m in.”

/

Running with the “freedom fighters” is exhilarating. 

Outside the ship’s kitchen door, Zuko kneels down with a set of lockpicks that he doesn’t know how to use. Still he sticks one in and taps the door’s lock just so, and the metal yields, and the ransacking begins. Jet goes for the chickens, wielding dual hook swords. Zuko spots six bowls of curry-flavored grits, and he stacks them up with a deft flip of his blades. He’d stop to wonder whether it’s the metal alone that lets him manage this feat or whether the earthenware bowls are speaking to him too, but a guard’s footsteps thump nearby, breaking his reverie. He leaps back out with Jet, locking the door behind them, and Longshot shoots a steel-tipped arrow into a nearby balcony with a rope attached. Zuko bends the steel so it’s more firmly lodged in the wood, and then they rappel down together, and Longshot pulls the arrow back out with a quiet grunt of exertion.

As the guard turns the corner, they disappear into the shadows.

/

“From what I heard, people eat like this every night in Ba Sing Se,” Jet remarks as they dig into their loot. “I can't wait to set my eyes on that giant wall.”

“It is a magnificent sight,” Uncle murmurs into his bowl.

Jet’s eyes spark with interest. “So you’ve been there before?”

“Once,” Uncle admits, “when I was a different man.”

He sounds genuinely rueful. Sensing danger, Zuko intervenes.

“I hear refugees get to stay in the Lower Ring,” he says, with only slightly forced enthusiasm, “with all the craftsmen and artisans.”

“Perhaps you may apprentice with a bladesmith, nephew,” Uncle says encouragingly.

Jet hums with interest. “You’re really into swords, huh?”

“I know a thing or two.”

“Is that how you…” Though Jet trails off, he keeps looking too intensely at Zuko. With a twinge of disappointment, Zuko realizes he’s looking at the scar. 

“It is a privilege,” Uncle says, “that we may find a new life in Ba Sing Se. A chance to forget the horrors of war.”

Out loud, Zuko agrees. But his eyes meet Jet’s, and they both know there’s no forgetting.

/

Uncle snores next to Zuko, sitting upright and whistling on each exhale. Zuko tries to settle in for the night too, but the sloshing of the waves below keeps rattling him awake. Careful not to disturb Uncle, Zuko steals from their bench to the railing where Jet’s now standing alone, gazing out at the moonlit waters.

“You said you’re freedom fighters,” Zuko mutters. “What do you mean by ‘freedom’? Is it just a general interest in civil liberties?“

Jet turns to him. Looks him up and down, considering.

“I mean freedom from the Fire Nation,” he says at last. “It took my home and my parents. Maybe I’m assuming too much here, but I bet you know how that feels.”

After a second, Zuko nods. “We have that in common.”

“I’m bringing Smellerbee and Longshot to Ba Sing Se because they’re younger. Less messed-up. They have a chance at that new life your uncle was talking about.”

“How about you?”

Jet’s mouth twists in a sham of a smile. “Every morning, I wake up and think about how to make the Fire Nation pay. That won’t change ‘til the day I die.” He plucks the stalk of oatrye from his lips, rolls it between his fingers. “What about you, Lee?” 

Zuko waits, caught by the dangerous spark in his grey-green eyes.

“...Same here.”

/

Jet leaves him with a promise, and then Zuko’s in Ba Sing Se.

He’d been staggered by the size of Omashu and then the Earth Kingdom’s plains, but Ba Sing Se grants a whole new lesson in magnitude. The Outer Wall stretches past the clouds. Once the train whisks through it with a gentle  _ whoosh,  _ there’s  _ more walls. _ Only walls, far as the eye can see.

Zuko’s not the one who’s been here before, but it feels like coming home.

He tries to drink in the vastness, the well-planned patterns of daily life spread below the train window, but he also keeps one eye on his uncle. So far Uncle Iroh’s taking his return to the city in stride, focused less on the walls and more on the floral hat he bought for too much money, back at the port. Zuko watches him anyway.

Once he gets over the initial shock of Ba Sing Se’s size, Zuko marvels at the impeccable organization. There’s an orderly line outside the train station to meet with officials at a designated Welcome Office. Those officials sort refugees into different sectors of the Lower Ring, assigning them housing and connecting them with employers. Uncle leaves with the addresses of five local teahouses in need of employees. He invites Zuko to join him, as a waiter if not a teamaker himself, but Zuko refuses the offer. 

(His dancing shoes get him pretty far, but pouring hot water with one eye is still a recipe for disaster.)

Instead Zuko gets the names of a couple blacksmiths in his sector, plus a warning that they only hire workers with prior experience. Uncle asks how someone’s supposed to  _ get _ experience if there’s no jobs for people without experience. The official smiles down at him and assures him there are limitless opportunities in Ba Sing Se.

That’s a little vague, but Zuko thanks her for her advice, undaunted. 

He and Uncle drop their belongings off in their humble but cozy new apartment, and then Uncle scurries off to interview with the nearest teahouse. Zuko slinks back to the Welcome Office.

“How can I enroll in school?”

“Adult citizens with a clean five-year-record may apply to Ba Sing Se University-“

“No,” Zuko chuckles, “no, I’m not looking for a full university experience.”

“If you advance to the Middle Ring you may attend one of our fine art schools, where students learn poetry, music and the other fine arts of Ba Sing Se culture.”

Zuko nearly forgets his initial goal and demands information on dance lessons, but he holds his tongue. “What about martial arts lessons?”

Though the official keeps smiling down at him, her eye twitches oddly. “As mentioned in your official welcome pamphlet, Ba Sing Se is a strictly peaceful city. There is no war or martial activity allowed in the city limits.”

“But martial arts aren’t always martial act-“

_ “None.” _

Zuko fidgets under her stare, briefly reminded of Azula. “How about earthbending schools?”

Her pose relaxes. “Earthbending is the most respected art form in Ba Sing Se, regulated with the highest standards by our cultural authority, the Dai Li. It takes decades of training and rigorous exams to be certified as a master, and to preserve the quality of education only a master may teach earthbending. Since we must also keep our class sizes small for optimal instruction, there are few seats available. However, you may apply for a place in an elementary class after only ten years in Ba Sing Se, if you have an entirely clean record with no violations in that time!”

She finishes her talk on a peppy high note, but for a second Zuko can only blink back at her, bewildered. 

“...Ten years? Are there other classes?” he says, sounding a little desperate. “Clubs? Ways to informally learn-“

“Teaching earthbending is forbidden to anyone who isn’t a master,” she replies promptly. “If we let uncertified amateurs teach poor technique, it would be an insult to the discipline and to the cultural heritage of the city. All teachers must be approved by the Dai Li.”

At first, ten years to get into an introductory class sounds a tad unreasonable. But maybe it’s that hard for firebenders to get training too, outside the palace. Maybe these regulations really are the only way to defend the art of earthbending in a city as large and organizationally challenging as Ba Sing Se.

(He’s got plenty of ideas on how a bending school  _ should  _ be run, but nobody cares about those.)

Zuko keeps his thoughts to himself, thanks her quietly, and slips away.

/

Over dinner that night, Zuko considers telling his Uncle, “Actually, I’ve seen enough of Ba Sing Se, and could we head back to Gaoling tomorrow?”

But he  _ hasn’t _ seen enough of Ba Sing Se, and Uncle’s thrilled about his new job as a tea server, and maybe he can at least find earthbenders to watch here. And there’s something impossibly comforting about a city still at peace, where nobody even  _ talks _ about the war, much lives it. 

(Plus there’s Jet’s promise, still lingering in his ear.)

Zuko decides to wait for a month in Ba Sing Se.


	6. Chapter 6

Zuko gets a job with one of the Lower Ring’s most respected blacksmiths.

Who, for the record, is not a bladesmith.

Because there are no swords in Ba Sing Se, unless one has lived for fifteen years without incident and received a proper permit from the Dai Li.

He tells the blacksmith- a snub-nosed, soot-stained woman named Tingting- that he’s looking to forge weapons, and she sighs and tells him about the law. There are no swords, and no daggers, and no armor, because there’s no war in Ba Sing Se. No blacksmith would dare keep or make weapons, under the circumstances.

(Privately, Zuko likes this rule a lot. It makes him feel much safer about the city streets.)

Tingting has two lethal-looking metal chopsticks poked through her bun, so Zuko figures there’s some wiggle room with the definition of “weapon.” Still, he doesn’t press. “Can I apprentice under you anyway? Maybe my skills won’t transfer, but I’m a quick learner and I’ve got a real passion for this work...“

So he has a job with a blacksmith now. Tingting makes very clear that he’s hired on a probationary basis, and that he’ll have to master all the main techniques of her forge in a week- punching and upsetting and the so-called “bending” that really just means “curving metal to a specific angle.” He uses real metalbending the entire way through, memorizing Tingting’s every movement and stealthily replicating it. When he presents his first product- a shallow dish to hold something small, maybe a candle- she examines it for a painfully long time before grunting.

“Huh. You really do know something about metal.”

He grins.

/

Tingting demands hard work when they’re in the forge, but she also puts down her tools at five every night and makes him do the same. “I get that metal’s your passion, but kid, have you ever tried an actual date?”

Zuko flushes red as the coals, and he doesn’t try staying late after that. He wanders around Ba Sing Se instead, dragging the metal of his shoes against the ground and feeling for earthbending. Maybe he’ll find an earthbender performing as a street artist, or a repeat of Gaoling’s Earth Rumble, or…

A ball game?

The rumbles are subtle, nothing like the din from the fight with Azula, but Zuko’s feet recognize earthbending now when they feel it. He stumbles down an alleyway into a residential courtyard, where three boys half his age are earthbending a leather ball back and forth, between two goals made of sticks. He waits at the sidelines until one of them scores a goal.

“Hi,” he says tentatively. “Can I join?”

All three boys spin around and give him an impressive stink-eye.

“Why?” says one kid, with a bandage around his head.

“Uh.” Zuko rubs the back of his head, unsure of himself. “I’m new in town. And I don’t know any other kids…” Technically, he knows three kids in Ba Sing Se, but he hasn’t seen a hair of them since they got onto different train cars. “Or at least nobody around here.”

Bandage Head crosses his arms. “The only way you get to play is if it’s us three against you, ‘cause you’re way bigger.”

Zuko nods. “That seems fair. I should warn you though, I’m not the best earthbender.”

/

Zuko isn’t the best earthbender.

In fact, Zuko might not be an earthbender at all.

It’s not easy tracking a ball through the air with one eye, but maybe he could compensate if his possibly latent, possibly non-existent earthbending skills showed up to help. They don’t. He tries copying the kids’ stances. He tries digging in his heels, turning them just so. He tries reaching deep inside himself and ordering the dirt to move. No matter how he pleads, the dirt’s about as useful to him as, well, dirt.

He can track the kids’ bending at least, can predict where walls will pop up right before they do, and he clings to that fighting chance. They raise blocks of dirt to lob the ball at him, and he can’t raise blocks of dirt to deflect it, which means he keeps flinging his own _unarmored body in the way instead._ He can’t move the ball with earthbending which means he has to move it by himself, dribbling the ball between his feet and kicking it at the goal, but they keep making walls to stop the ball, and once he figures out how to kick the ball _over_ the walls they just throw up little hurtles in his way so he trips. Once he learns how to sense the hurtles coming and hop over them, the hurtles get way bigger, and once he starts dancing around them they get faster with their bending, so he doesn’t have time to dodge or stop and just charges into a mass of earth-

“Ow,” Zuko grunts, sprawled on his back.

“Hey.” Bandage Head lifts his hands, fiddling with the cloth. “I think you need this more than I do.”

Zuko laughs and refuses, because while he’ll be black and blue tomorrow he’s not outright bleeding (yet), and he wipes away some of the dust and gets back to his feet for another round. The kids throw up another massive wall because they found a strategy that works and they’re sticking to it, and Zuko should have known and prepared for this somehow, but once again he’s barreling headlong into an unbreakable wall-

It breaks apart like magic, turned to powder on impact. Emerging from a cloud of dust, he scores.

“Nice work, now you’re only down nineteen points instead of twenty!”

Zuko’s officially the world’s worst earthbender. The kids look at him funny as he whoops with joy.

/

They seem surprised when he asks to come back, but then they shrug and say yes. He joins them regularly after work, and the boys bend the dust out of his clothes so he can come home clean, without raising too many questions. Uncle’s shift at the teahouse ends after the dinner rush, and Zuko’s always waiting at home with hot food and a smile.

“Ba Sing Se agrees with you,” Uncle observes.

“How about you, Uncle?”

“I have been allowed to introduce my own blend next week,” he announces, voice colored by both pride and anxiety. “I will have to work around the clock to provide the perfect combination. There is a question of the leaves, and then the temperature of the water, and then when one steeps the leaves there’s trouble if you leave them too long...”

/

Zuko sits on his sleeping mat, reading a treatise on Ba Sing Se’s glorious history, sipping the tenth blend Uncle’s tried out this week. He’ll compliment this one extravagantly, just like all the others, though in honesty they taste just like hot leaf juice to him. His _dao_ waits in a nearby cabinet, hidden from casual observers but calling at the edge of his awareness, the way candles must call to firebenders. He and Uncle stay barefoot inside the house, so he keeps his walking stick nearby, now rolling it absent-mindedly along the ground.

He sits, waiting.

_Thump._

It’s a subtle sound as someone leaps from a nearby tree to the balcony outside his bedroom. In one fluid movement Zuko abandons the scroll to dash to his window, throwing it wide open.

“Jet,” he whispers.

With one quiet leap, Jet bounds over the windowsill into Zuko’s room and then charges forward, pinning him against the wall with a hooked sword against his throat.

“You wanna tell me,” Jet murmurs, his smooth voice now deathly quiet and laced with a threat, “why I just saw your uncle warming his tea without a flame in sight?”

Zuko presses his eyes shut and silently curses Uncle. Sure, nobody’s going to take him out with a _sword,_ but the threat still burns too deep.

“We’re earthbenders,” he finally replies, vaguely nauseous as he lies through his teeth. “And that’s a thing in earthbending. It’s not that we’re _great_ earthbenders, that’s just the only trick he can do, warming up earthenware dishes and things because they were originally made of earth.” He’s rambling, but Jet’s still pressed too close and Zuko can’t stop. ”Actually, if you take it to the extreme you can even melt rock!”

“Really,” Jet deadpans.

“Yeah, it gets all red-hot and liquid and then it’s...it’s called lavabending,” Zuko finishes lamely. 

He doesn’t think he’s ever sounded this silly in his life, at least not since proposing an Agni Kai, and Jet seems to agree. Still he steps back, not sheathing his sword but letting it fall.

“Prove it.”

“What?”

“You know.” Jet gestures with his sword. “You say you’re an earthbender. Go ahead and prove it.”

Zuko gapes at him.

“I’m waiting.”

Desperately, Zuko looks around his neat room, free of both dust and dirt. His vision snags on his teacup.

His earthenware teacup.

There was a firebending exercise the tutors gave Azula when she was five, when Zuko still sat and watched and hoped his flame would one day show up. She’d throw a clay disk in the air, take aim, and fireball it.

He dives for his cup, drains the last bit of tea, tosses it in the air and punches it as it falls, like he’s spiking a volleyball. With a _crack,_ it disintegrates to finely ground powder.

“Nephew? Are you all right?”

“Fine,” Zuko calls, cursing under his breath and mentally turning the metal lock on his door. “Just dropped something, I’ll clean it up.”

There’s a pause.

“Let me know if you require help!”

“Mm-hmm,” Zuko replies, not really listening.

Jet’s staring at him and the dust cloud settling around them. “Okay, then. You’re not firebenders.”

“No.”

“But _you_ have gold eyes,” Jet says, almost to himself.

“I'm mixed race.”

“You good at earthbending?”

“No, I’m good at breaking things,” he says, quickly and a little sad.

At last sheathing his sword, Jet lets out a chuckle that’s half a sigh. “We have that in common.”

/

“Tingting says I need to work on my art skills,” Zuko tells his uncle. “I have to take a pottery class at night.”

It’s only half a lie. He _did_ enroll in a pottery class- unlike sculpture, pottery is not considered a fine art and is therefore taught in the Lower Ring without much regulation from the Dai Li, and he hopes it won’t suffer too much from the lack of their cultural oversight. But Tingting’s not the one who shoved him into it.

Jet is.

The class is literally underground. According to Jet, it’s an underground way to learn earthbending, and he rolled his eyes as Zuko launched a thousand protests about legality.

“Sure, it’s legal, they’re not _teaching_ earthbending, they’re just teaching pottery that you could theoretically _make_ with earthbending,” Jet assured him. “Anyway, what’s your big thing with legality? We’ve gotta work on that.”

Zuko’s still not convinced that it’s all legitimate, but the room’s well-lit, with rows of stone tables covered in canvas, prepared with brushes and sponges and blocks of clay. The elderly teacher comes up to coo at him immediately, because apparently he’s both the newest and the youngest person in the class. She seats him in the front row so she can help him easily, between two other grey-haired pupils, and the class begins.

The man on Zuko’s left takes off immediately, forming an elaborate jar with interwoven rings entirely with his hands and tools- no bending required, as far as Zuko can tell. The woman on his right slaps her block of clay onto the canvas, and then kicks the base of the stone table. The clay immediately springs up in the shape of a long-necked jar, complete with perfectly matching handles.

For his part, Zuko follows his teacher’s instructions as closely as he can, making a tiny pinch pot. He jabs his thumb into the center and raises the pot’s walls by pinching the clay, and then he makes a base by stacking several coils and sticks the pot on top. At the end of the class, he tries to move it from the canvas onto a tray that'll be taken to the kiln-

_Crack._

The pot snaps right off the base, as if it’s already been baked.

The teacher rushes over, picking up the two oddly warm pieces and inspecting them through thick-rimmed eyeglasses. “It’s gone dry. Did you add water-“

Zuko nods. “Two times, like you told me. But…” When she glances at him encouragingly, he continues. “But it kept sticking to everything, so maybe I dried it with bending. Earthbending! On accident.”

For a second he frets that maybe drying out clay is a _firebending_ skill. He hopes not, because he can’t take another hit to the foundation of his life.

“Oh,” she says, eyebrows jumping. “I have seen this sort of intuition in earthbenders, from time to time. Sometimes the dirt will respond to your will, through no conscious effort of your own.”

“Is that...normal?”

She pauses. 

“I wouldn’t presume to teach earthbending,” she says with a hint of sarcasm. “But it’s rare. I see it in students who had no teachers growing up- whose only master was the earth.”

Zuko’s only master was the sword- swords and walls and metal. He doesn’t pry further, just thanks her with a proper Earth Kingdom bow and takes his leave.

/

“Did you enjoy your first class?” Iroh asks when he returns home.

Wordlessly, Zuko drops the pieces of his very first pot on the table. “I’ll try again tomorrow.”

Iroh’s whole face splits into a smile. “Of course you will.”

As Zuko flees into his bedroom, Iroh takes up the halves and fits them back together. It’s a delicate seam, barely visible if you hold the pieces together just so, and a skilled earthbender might be able to join them back together without a thought.

Iroh is no earthbender.

With a sigh he sets the pieces down again and looks to Zuko’s door, now completely shut. He remembers Lu Ten at this delicate age, full of rebellion and badly thought-out schemes and secrets he could never keep for more than a day. When Zuko announced he would be attending pottery classes with his eyes firmly downcast, Iroh had interpreted “pottery class” as code for some other form of adolescent mischief. A secret romance, perhaps. A foray into one of Ba Sing Se’s laxer bars.

Then Zuko turned up right when he said he would, completely sober, with the real pieces of a real pot that certainly _looks_ like a beginner’s work- clumsy, yet full of effort and promise. Iroh can spot no hint of deception.

The lock on Zuko’s door clicks shut, and Iroh is reminded once more of this city, crown jewel of the Earth Kingdom- magnificent but guarded, full of walls and secrets.

/

“What _is it_ with you and following rules?” Jet asks, draped on the windowsill of Zuko’s bedroom.

Zuko eyes him carefully. “I’ve gotten in trouble for not knowing the rules before.”

“Fire Nation rules?”

He recalls a rushed meeting with a legal secretary, before a farce of an Agni Kai. “Yeah. Fire Nation rules.”

“Has it occurred to you that the rules are wrong,” Jet says casually, “so the right thing to do is ignore them?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means…” Jet plucks the oatrye from his mouth, weaving it between calloused fingers. “The Fire Nation has broken every treaty. Every law on war crimes. You can’t win playing by the rules, because _they’re_ not playing by the rules.”

“So what would you do?”

“...Imagine, hypothetically, that there’s an Earth Kingdom town overrun by Fire Nation soldiers. There’s a dam nearby. If you take out the dam, the whole town would flood, and all those soldiers would end up floating down the river. You get your hands on a couple barrels of the Fire Nation’s blasting jelly. What do you do?”

Zuko narrows his eyes. “That’s awfully specific.”

“What do you do?” Jet insists.

“...Is there an established garrison?” 

Jet shrugs. “Sure.”

“With a building for an established base?”

“A massive building,” Jet confirms.

“You know how the Fire Nation takes down buildings?” Zuko says thoughtfully, recalling his tactics lessons. “It’s called controlled demolition. All they need is a couple really carefully aimed charges, pointed towards the foundational beams at a slanting angle...filled with blasting jelly.”

For a second, Jet goes eerily still. Then he swings his legs around, facing Zuko head-on. “That’s good.”

Zuko shakes his head. “No, it’s nothing.”

Jet cuts him off. “That’s _really_ good. I mean, you’d still have to get a blueprint of the place, and you’d need to sneak past the guards to set the charges-“

“The Fire Nation’s outposts tend to keep the same guard schedules night to night, it’d just take one night’s recon to figure out the pattern,” Zuko offers, words speeding. “And they tend to repurpose existing buildings instead of making their own, so you could find blueprints in town.”

”You think big,” Jet comments.

“I used to think about strategy a lot,” he mutters, his unburned cheek flushing red. “Haven’t had reason to in a while.”

“You heard about the comet coming up?”

Zuko frowns. “Sozin’s Comet?”

“They say the Fire Nation will get more powerful than ever before.”

Zuko can’t disagree. He hasn’t been home in three years, but even back then he’d heard the earliest plots for a comet-powered invasion. It’ll strengthen every firebender and bathe the world in flames unable to do anything but rage and consume and kill.

“Ba Sing Se hasn’t fallen yet,” he answers hopefully, feeling stupid even as he says it. “They must know the comet’s coming, they’ll have their guard up.”

Jet just gives him a look.

“Well, what would _you_ do?” Zuko demands, fully aware that the Dragon of the West is a stone’s throw away.

Jet shrugs. “I don’t know, but the comet’s the real reason I came here. I thought there’d have to be a war effort. Maybe a militia. But-“ he grinds his teeth- “they don’t even talk about the war here.”

Hearing that, Zuko frowns. “They must have their own forces ready. And if they do, there’s no point to causing mass panic-“

“What if they don’t?”

He opens his mouth for a retort and then finds he doesn’t have one. All he has is a slow-burning fury, rising silently within him. His first instinct is to do nothing, just wait for the comet and hope for the best, but he knows better.

“What do you want to do?” Zuko says, quiet and urgent.

Jet snorts. “I wish there was a dam we could take out. Just flood all of Caldera.”

Zuko lets his eyes drift closed as he imagines it- Caldera, gone. The palace, the arena, all washed away.

“Jet? Hypothetically speaking, would you have blown up the hypothetical dam?”

Jet’s eyes narrow, dangerous. “Don’t you dare judge me too-“

“I’m not,” Zuko replies hastily. “I just want to understand why.”

“The Fire Nation’s evil. Isn’t that good enough?”

“But there were Earth Kingdom citizens there too.”

“Did you hear that argument back at the port?” Jet asks after a moment. “About the cabbages?”

“...the cabbages?”

Jet nods, entirely serious. “This guy was a cabbage merchant, and he had a whole wagon of cabbages he wanted to bring into Ba Sing Se. But security destroyed the whole thing.”

Remembering the food they got _instead_ on the boat, Zuko shudders. “Why?”

“Because all it takes is one hidden cabbage slug to wreck all the crops here. One slug, and the entire city goes down. Maybe it seems wasteful to destroy the cabbages, but sometimes you have to think bigger. Sometimes there’s sacrifices you just have to make.”

Zuko closes his eyes.

“Sometimes,” Jet whispers, unfairly magnetic, “it’s the only honorable thing to do.”

They fall into contemplative silence.

“I don’t know how you could stop the entire Fire Nation,” Zuko murmurs at last. “But I know when. There’s an eclipse coming up, which’ll get rid of firebending for just a couple minutes. The Day of Black Sun.”


	7. Chapter 7

Zuko learned strategy from the Fire Lord’s own war council. He has not forgotten. He’s personally visited the secure bunker buried below the palace, built with some metal but mostly stone, hollowed out of the volcano of Caldera itself. 

(Someone skilled at bending rock could break in so easily.)

Zuko doubles his focus in pottery classes, willing the clay to obey his conscious commands. He kicks the stone and he punches the clay and he shouts out orders. He waits.

The clay doesn’t listen. He winds up forming all his pots by hand.

He forms his plans and waits by the window, and Jet never comes.

/

Zuko comes home one night, bearing a new iron teapot he cast just for Uncle at work.

He starts to speak and then trails off as Uncle hands him a poster. His first thought is _that’s weird,_ because pamphlets and posters are banned in Ba Sing Se, as part of a city-wide push against litter. Then he flips it over to find a drawing of a sky bison and a message:

> _Searching for a flying sky bison._  
>  _His name is Appa, he has six legs and weighs ten tons.  
> _ _If you have any information, please contact Avatar Aang.  
>  Upper Ring, 96th District, house #217._

Zuko’s second thought is that he can’t believe the Avatar’s survived this long, if he’s willing to trumpet his address around Ba Sing Se. Even in a city this safe, it seems reckless.

Third, he places the paper down carefully on their living room table and looks Uncle in the eye. “So the Avatar’s in the city.”

Uncle looks back up, considering him with an unsettling intensity. “And what do you wish to do?”

Zuko weighs the iron teapot still in his hands. 

“I’m going to do nothing,” he replies evenly.

Uncle’s eyes widen a little, but then he nods. “I do not disagree, but may I ask why?”

“Because even if I get the Avatar, the Fire Lord won’t really accept me back into the country.”

It’s not a lie.

Uncle doesn’t even blink. “Is there any other reason?”

Zuko shifts. Feels for the _dao_ waiting in the next room, if necessary.

“Because the Fire Lord’s kicked the world out of balance,” he says, trying not to make it sound like a challenge. “The Avatar might help restore it.”

Uncle waits for a moment, then gives him a beatific smile. “You have grown into a wise young man, Prince Zuko.”

Awkwardly, Zuko thrusts forward the teapot. “Tingting helped me make this for you.”

Uncle looks like he might explode from joy. 

/

Zuko’s hurrying to pottery class. He got his clay to jump up a little yesterday, and he doesn’t think it’s just because he hit the table so hard it dented. Frankly, even denting the solid rock table was progress on the earthbending front.

“Lee!” calls a thoroughly unfamiliar voice.

Zuko stops short. “Longshot?”

He frowns as the lanky kid weaves through traffic to get to him. Smellerbee darts out from an alleyway, not far behind.

“Have you seen Jet?” she demands.

“...what do you mean?”

“He disappeared a week and a half ago,” she explains, while Longshot grimaces impressively behind her. 

Zuko frowns. “Last time I met him was two weeks back. Where’d you last see him?”

“At his apartment. But he said he found a local resistance movement, and he was going to talk to them about ambushing the Fire Nation.” Longshot shifts, and Smellerbee’s brow darkens. “Even though he _said_ we’d forget about the war.”

Zuko glances around the bustling town, all decked out in green, and wonders if there are Fire Nation agents crawling like fire-roaches, even here.

He narrows his eyes. “Take me to his apartment.”

If that’s the last place they saw Jet, it’s the logical first place to start a search. And Zuko intends to search, even if he has to get a special permit to put up posters, even if he has to beg the Avatar for assistance in his quest-

“Jet!”

Smellerbee squeals in joy, because Jet’s sitting on the floor of his apartment. He’s apparently unharmed. Then Zuko notices the odd, dazed look in his eyes.

The oatrye’s gone.

Zuko falls to his knees before him. “What happened?”

Jet blinks at him, as if he’s noticing Zuko for the first time. “What are you doing here?”

“We were worried about you,” Smellerbee says, running up and flinging her arms around him. “I haven’t seen you in ages!”

“Neither have I,” Zuko adds quietly.

“Where have you been?”

“I…” Jet frowns. “I was lost. I guess.”

Zuko narrows his eyes. “Did you lose time?”

Shakily, Jet nods.

“What’s your name?” Zuko asks, probing for something missing.

“Jet,” he replies promptly.

“Where are you?”

“Ba Sing Se.”

“Why are you here?”

“To start a new life after my village burned down.”

Zuko frowns at his automatic answer, because it’s not strictly true. Jet came here to help with the war. But- Zuko glances at Smellerbee and Longshot- maybe he’s just trying to shield them from his true intentions.

“Why did it burn down?” Zuko says hesitantly.

There’s a flicker of pain, but it disappears. “A wildfire.”

“How do you know me and Longshot?” Smellerbee interrupts, a little panicked.

“We were freedom fighters together.”

“What were you fighting for?” asks Zuko.

And Jet scrunches up his brow and says, “I don’t know. Civil liberties? I guess?”

Zuko leans forward. “How do you know _me?”_

“We stole food that one time, right? On the boat?” 

Jet stares at him with the slick smile he grants _everybody._ With a sinking heart Zuko realizes Jet doesn’t really know him at all.

/

Zuko’s heard of this before, among wounded soldiers coming back to the Fire Nation. Soldiers so scarred they forgot half their lives, sometimes running far away, believing they were someone else entirely. People would cut out whole swaths of their identity, abandoning them out of pain. 

In this case, Jet’s left the whole war behind.

He tells Smellerbee and Longshot this, and they nod in grim agreement.

“We’ll take care of him,” she promises.

“Let me know if he comes back,” Zuko says out of stupid, stupid hope.

There's no more use for him here. He steals one last glance at Jet before leaving him behind. Before leaving, alone.

There’s still a war to fight.

/

Zuko’s in the back room of the smithy, forging a set of doorknobs. In his mind he considers a bunker made of stone and a little bit of metal.

(And as he pours red-hot metal into neat little molds, anger flares, red-hot and liquid and ugly within him. He holds his breath and holds the feeling back. Jet might have been right and the Fire Nation might be nothing but _wrong,_ and there’s a chasm opening in his life where Jet should go, but Zuko can’t let his wrath run loose, not yet-)

“I told you,” Tingting says loudly in the front room. “We don’t make weapons here. It’s strictly forbidden by the Dai Li, so unless you’ve got a permit…”

She walks up to Zuko a couple minutes later with a befuddled look on her face, holding a very official-looking permit and an intimidatingly long scroll, presumably listing design specifications. She groans. “I’m going to be here all night.”

“Someone ordered weapons?”

“Top priority for King Kuei’s new personal guards,” Tingting grumbles, unfurling the scroll. “Twenty items to be delivered to the palace in three days. They’re awfully _particular.”_

Zuko winces in sympathy and returns to his own work. He uses metalbending more than usual to speed things along so he can help with all the work Tingting has to shove aside for this order. He can get away with it because Tingting’s paying him no attention. She doesn’t even remember to kick him out at sundown, because all her focus is on the new weapons she’s crafting, on the delicate throwing knives and the retractable daggers and the funny, metal-tipped arrows-

“Wait a minute.”

“Huh?” She looks up at him, holding two red-hot pokers.

“Can I see the spec scroll? Just out of curiosity?”

She grunts in assent and returns to her work. Zuko tries to still his quaking hands as he unrolls the scroll.

That’s Mai’s handwriting.

These are Mai’s knives.

The Fire Nation’s already conquered Ba Sing Se.

/

Zuko feels bad about it, but he scrambles out of the smithy right then with a half-baked, mumbled excuse. He dashes into the apartment-

“Hey, Uncle, I’ll be out late tonight!”

And dashes back out, wearing armor under a loose brown robe. He’s bent his swords, wrapping them all around his torso like a bodice. His old opera mask dangles from his belt. 

It’s easier than he thought, slipping into the Upper Ring, all the way to the Avatar’s house. He dashes down the road to house 217-

And finds the aftermath of a grand battle. Half the side of the house is just missing, covered only by a fluttering tarp. The door’s been thrown open, so Zuko steps inside and checks.

There’s no one in sight.

He runs back out again and hides in the shadows and tries to think this out. The Fire Nation’s gotten to King Kuei. With Zuko’s luck, there _is_ no King Kuei anymore, just Queen Azula.

The silver lining: it seems like a silent coup. It’s weird to imagine Azula being silent towards anyone but him, but he can see the tactical advantages of not announcing the Fire Nation’s victory immediately. And if it’s a silent victory, that means she couldn’t have killed off everyone at the top; she’ll need them alive, to sign off on her orders and pose in parades. That means the king- and probably his top advisors and ministers, and maybe even the Avatar and his friends- are all in captivity. They could be on house arrest in the palace proper, but maybe not; Azula would pick some place more secure. A prison, but one close enough to the palace that she can haul people out for show, and Zuko drops his face in his hands and wracks his brain and tries to worm his way into _Azula’s_ brain-

Old Ba Sing Se.

Zuko read about this. The old city’s still below the palace, and though it’s mainly frequented by university students for archaeology digs, there’s an old jail still used for politically sensitive prisoners. 

An old metal jail.

Zuko pulls on his mask and takes off running.

/

He breaks into Ba Sing Se University. From there, it’s easy to find doors labeled “Anthropology Department” and shake their locks open, and it’s easy to leap down a narrow staircase into an underground city, abandoned and utterly lonely. He panics for a second at the darkness before he spies an eerie green glint to his left.

Zuko feels his way forward, relying on his shoes until a mass of green glowing crystals come into sight. There are old buildings around him, surrounded by scaffolding and archaeology tools. He gives an exploratory tap with his foot and feels something, maybe movement in front of him.

A massive _clang_ seals the deal.

He barges into what’s definitely the prison, filled with hallways of sleek metal cell doors, and he runs his fingers along the handles and undoes all the locks, and he turns a corner and-

_Crash._

“Hey!” The small girl who declared he was an earthbender runs full speed into his metal armor and goes sprawling. “Watch where you’re going!”

“You crashed into _me!”_

“...Dusty?”

Zuko gapes at her. “Watch out, Azula-“

“Captured us and the Earth King, we know.” The boy in blue turns the corner too, panting.

Then the Earth King himself appears, looking just like his picture in the history books, and Zuko instinctually drops into a low bow. “Your Majesty-“

“Save the formalities,” the girl says, getting to her feet. 

Curious, Zuko peeks around the corner. The door to what must have been their cell lies crumpled on the floor. “...How did you break out?”

She tips her head up and gives him a humongous grin. “I...invented _metalbending._ Which makes me the greatest earthbender of all time!”

All Zuko can do is stare.

“Come on,” the boy in blue says. “We’ve gotta get the bear.”

Zuko keeps staring at them as they sweep past him, out of the jail. Then, he stares at the cell door they broke through, which has been utterly demolished in the sloppiest, ugliest display of metalbending he’s ever seen in his life. He could have done better _as an untrained nine-year-old._

With a shake of his head, he bends the door back into place and smooths out the creases- metalbending might still be a secret, though not if that girl keeps shouting it at the top of her lungs- before unlocking the rest of the doors. 

“Get out and fight,” he calls. “For the Earth Kingdom!”

Slowly five doors open, and burly men- generals, if Zuko’s reading his insignia right- emerge.

“We will,” one man declares. 

Zuko bows to them all. Then he turns the corner, bends a quick stash of weapons that he leaves on the floor for the generals, and flees.

/

As he’s running away, the ground rumbles beneath him. It brings Zuko to a halt.

That’s earthbending, behind him. He can recognize the feeling now, the sensation of what sounds like the world’s most violent game of earthbending ball. He shouldn’t be surprised- he didn’t see any guards watching the generals, but that doesn’t mean there _weren’t_ any.

_Boom._

That’s firebending, in front of him. The same sound he heard every day of his childhood. Amongst the green crystals, there’s a glimmer of blue light.

After a split-second calculation, he runs towards the fire.

When he draws closer and squints with his one good eye, he makes out the girl in blue and the Avatar, locked in battle against Azula. Zuko pauses for a moment, trying to figure out the terrain.

Twelve men appear from nowhere. From underground- they’re earthbenders, in official matching uniforms, no doubt agents of the Earth Kingdom government. They swivel around in unison, aiming right towards the fight.

Stealthily unbending two longswords from under his robe, Zuko leaps in. He won’t hesitate in standing with them all. In standing against the Fire Nation.

There’s a rumble, and one of the men hurls a block of stone forward. On instinct honed in his ballgames, Zuko flings up a sword and turns it to dust.

An impossibly tense silence descends. A second later, Zuko realizes the stranger was aiming at _Aang._

“How dare you?” he exclaims on instinct, a sudden swell of rage flooding his head. “No, seriously. Who do you think you _are?_ You’re sworn to protect the Earth Kingdom.” As his fury blooms red-hot, his voice seems to get louder, as if the cave walls themselves are amplifying it. “Your _duty_ is to the Earth King, and yet you’d bow before a fourteen-year-old Fire Nation princess like you’re sniveling babies yourselves!”

The whole cave goes quiet.

Zuko waits for the men to make a move.

They wait for something else.

At last, Azula’s laugh rings through the cave, right out of Zuko’s nightmares. He turns warily to find her staring at him. _“You.”_

Zuko’s wearing a mask. But it’s a mask Mother bought him from her favorite play, and he’s got two swords in his hands, and his voice hasn’t changed that much in three years. Azula laughs, eyes glinting with shock and sure recognition.

Her shock morphs into fascination, then morbid delight.

“You’re a _bastard,”_ she says, relishing the words.

Zuko stumbles like the ground just shook underneath him, and as the cave crackles and her hands come alight he can see nothing but the Fire Lord’s fist, draped in flaming red-

Zuko clenches his fists, wrenching the metal gauntlets of Azula’s armor forward. No one can hear it under the crackle of the lightning, no one else can see it under the blinding white and blue. No one else knows what’s about to happen.

The lightning flashes from her fingers and instantly hits the bent metal. There’s the sudden blaze of a short circuit. Then everything _explodes,_ a massive cloud of smoke choking all their lungs, the whole cavern resounding, thunderous. 

Maybe no one else hears the shriek underneath.

Zuko can’t freeze. That’s what got him last time, in the arena against his father, and he feels for Aang’s hand and hauls him out, weaving among the Earth Kingdom agents. They run into the girl in blue near the exit. Zuko steals a glance backwards and finds that all the men in green uniforms are gone.

So is Azula.

Zuko freezes.

“Come on!” Aang tugs at his hand.

Zuko keeps stumbling as he follows them out of the crystal caves. Keeps choking on the sensation of smoke, lingering too long in his mouth.

“You’re Lee, right?” Aang says as they race upwards.

“Right, Lee,” Zuko says, breathless. “I work- worked for a blacksmith who got weird orders from the palace; I came to see if anything was wrong.”

“Wow,” Aang comments. “That’s a lucky coincidence!”

Zuko doesn’t remark on that. “Why are you in Ba Sing Se?”

“We need to arrange an invasion during the eclipse coming up,” the girl says. “But we need the Earth King’s help for that, and then we got stuck in politics-“

“Wait,” Zuko says, briefly pausing for breath. “Why do you need the Earth King?”

They look at him strangely. Skeptical, the girl asks, “Do you know any other major militaries that might be free?”

“Are you trying to destroy the entire Fire Nation?”

“What?” Aang splutters. “No! Just the Fire Lord.”

Zuko starts climbing again with a quiet sigh. “You don’t need a major military for that. You’d be better off with a stealth mission. Just get in and out.”

“...Huh,” he says. “That hadn’t occurred to me.”

Zuko resists the urge to facepalm. “Anything else you desperately need?”

“Nope,” says Aang, “not unless you’ve got a spare firebending master on your hands!”

Closing his eyes in the silence that follows, Zuko hesitates. 

He breathes, pressing down the tides of fire surging in his head.

He builds a plan.

/

“Uncle?”

“You’re back!” Uncle shoots up from his chair, abandoning a cup of tea. “I was worried-“

Zuko holds up a hand, brown robes now tied over the mask and metal again. “I’m fine. I just need you not to freak out, because...I kinda brought someone home.”

Uncle’s face cartwheels through a bewildering range of expressions. “I see. It’s not uncommon at your age to meet someone special…”

“Yeah,” Zuko agrees hesitantly. “He’s probably the most special person I’ve ever met.”

Uncle’s eyes go wide as saucers. “Is he?”

“Yes. No!” Zuko’s unscarred cheek turns bright red as he realizes what Uncle’s implying. “Um.”

He abruptly gives up on speaking and just throws the apartment door wide open, revealing a twelve-year-old about to sprain his cheeks smiling.

“Hi, Mister Mushi-” he gives a peppy wave- “I’m the Avatar!”


	8. Chapter 8

Introducing General Iroh of the Fire Nation to the Avatar goes smoothly. 

Too smoothly.

Aang and the other boy- Sokka, Zuko knows that now- leaves the Earth King with his generals, a pile of reading and strict instructions not to get overthrown again, at least not until the comet. They request _some_ Earth Kingdom action on the day of the eclipse, just so it looks like they tried. But the real plan is stealth now. Essentially, it’s the same strategy Azula employed in Ba Sing Se, turned against the Fire Nation. They’ll sneak into the bunker and kill the Fire Lord. 

“After that,” Sokka comments, “we’ll just take over the Fire Nation army and order everyone to quit blowing things up. Easy-peasy.”

Zuko doubts this, but he frowns and keeps his silence.

For his part, Uncle takes everything in stride, with worryingly few protests. It’s a little concerning how quickly Aang and his friends take to “Mister Mushi.” After just a few days of brewing tea and dispensing riddles, he’s trusted like they’ve known him all his life. Zuko watches him, since they won’t.

/

Flying on Appa under a shield of clouds, their group easily makes its way to a lush Fire Nation island. Without delay Uncle steals into the nearest town and buys them a new wardrobe all in red, and Zuko gives up his rough Earth Kingdom greens and dons his disguise- black pants and a long crimson tunic. They’re made from soft, expensive fabric that Uncle should’ve known not to splurge on, and Zuko’s heart wrenches out of place as he changes, though they’re not quite palace-level finery. Dressed likewise in red, Aang covers up his arrow with a hat, and Zuko teaches Katara and Sokka how to bundle their hair into neat, centered top-knots. Despite regular trimming, Zuko’s hair is easily long enough for a top-knot of its own, but he opts for a braid instead. Though it’s not quite a Ba Sing Se queue- he has no intention of shaving off even the front part of his hair, because he’s tried baldness and it’s just not his look- the style might still raise eyebrows in the Fire Nation. 

(Uncle raises his eyebrows, but makes no comment.)

/

Once they find shelter, far from prying eyes, Uncle begins to train Aang as a firebender. He’s gentle about it, soothing the boy’s natural fear of fire. As Uncle entrances Aang for hours, Zuko’s torn between disbelief and slithering envy. Aang has to meditate over a stupid candle just like Zuko, but he gets to have Uncle beside him, filling the time with legends and stories and a book’s worth of incomprehensible proverbs.

“Master Jeong Jeong,” Aang protests early on, “told me fire’s all about destruction. You have to be totally scared all the time or else it’ll eat everything in sight!”

Uncle wrinkles his brow. “I have had many...spirited discussions with Master Jeong Jeong about the basis of our bending. We agree that fire comes from emotion,” he admits, “but I know a secret he does not.”

Aang leans in a little closer. Zuko- who’s sharpening his _dao_ after Sokka’s insisted on sparring with him for the tenth time, because “really, I’m going to beat Lee at swordbending this time around”- leans in too.

“You may use any feeling within you,” Uncle says, with a small smile. “Fear and anger, yes. Also serenity. Passion. Joy.”

Aang recoils with a snort of pure skepticism. “Joy?”

“These days, the Fire Nation pretends its bending was made for war, but it isn’t true. The first medium, the first way humans learned to express their inner fire, was _dance.”_

This time, Zuko’s snort is louder than Aang’s.

“Dance?” he squawks. “There’s no way!”

“It’s true, nephew,” Uncle says, straightening up with a cheery belly laugh. “The quickest way to know the soul of our nation is to strap on a pair of dancing shoes!”

Zuko nearly kicks off his dancing shoes on principle, but Uncle doesn’t seem to have meant it as a personal jab, just another one of his over-poetic proverbs. He stays quiet as Uncle carries on with his history lesson, as Aang listens wide-eyed to his insistence that fire isn’t _really_ evil…

/

Zuko watches Uncle. Sometimes, he catches Uncle watching him back, the way he evaluates a particularly threatening opponent during _pai sho._ He watches, though Zuko’s done his best to keep his walls up and his thoughts guarded.

“Nephew, I-“

“Hey, Lee.” Sokka barges in. “I figured out why you keep beating me at sparring!”

Zuko flinches. “You what?”

“Yeah!” Looming over him, Sokka crosses his arms. “You’ve got _two swords_ and I only have one. It’s blatantly unfair!”

“Do you...want me to just spar with one sword?” Zuko ventures.

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” Grabbing a single longsword, Zuko rises to his feet.

“Plus as reparations _I_ get to have two swords now!”

Zuko rolls his eyes but follows him to the field without protesting, escaping Uncle’s stare for now.

/

“How did you still win?” Sokka wails half an hour later, lying facedown with his two swords abandoned beside him. “What am I _missing?”_

/

“Fire is the element of power,” Uncle tells Aang. Zuko’s known that fact since before he could speak. He counts on it now, the fact that a Fire Nation prince by nature will demand all the power and glory he is owed. Uncle Iroh may play the peace-lover, but under that mask he is the Dragon of the West, feared around the world for both his persistence and his acumen, more experienced with Fire Lord Ozai’s cruelty than even Zuko.

He must know that Fire Lord Azulon’s will was forged. He must know that Ozai stole his crown.

Zuko doesn’t trust Uncle, exactly. As a rule he doesn’t trust anyone in the Fire Nation royal family, soaked as it is with bloodthirst and deceit. He closes his eyes some nights and thinks of Jet and his dreams of just vengeance, of setting the whole spirits-damned country aflame.

(He won’t say it aloud, not around Uncle and this bizarrely pacifist kid of an Avatar, but it’s a beautiful vision.)

For now, Zuko will settle for destroying Ozai. That means aiding the Avatar. And though Aang intends to strike during the eclipse and defeat Ozai easily, Uncle must know as well as Zuko that that plan will shatter- even if he can’t guess how. That means he must play his role, and smile over tea, and teach the Avatar firebending.

Uncle believes in destiny, Zuko knows, and everyone says it’s the Avatar’s destiny to restore peace and balance. It’s why Zuko trusts Uncle with Aang for now, at least for as long as Uncle needs the Avatar on his side.

If Uncle Iroh plays the long game just a little longer, he’ll finally have his crown.

/

Before he ever introduced Aang and Uncle, Zuko explained to all the kids very carefully about how Mister Mushi didn’t know “Lee” was an earthbender, and how that fact needed to be kept secret. Mister Mushi also didn’t know Lee went around fighting Fire Nation princesses, so Lee only met the Avatar when he visited his house, to consult on a boomerang Sokka had ordered from Tingting’s smithy.

Aang heard him out before immediately saying, “Why?”

“Because my cousin- Mister Mushi’s son- was _killed_ by earthbenders, and if he finds out his own nephew’s an earthbender he might kill me.”

“Non-literally, right?” Katara asked.

“I haven’t found out yet,” Zuko answered drily.

Aang and his friends have been as discreet as he could expect- a little clumsy maybe, but Uncle doesn’t seem to have noticed. The gang just establishes via a couple extra-loud conversations that Aang is a sensitive student, who needs a lot of space and privacy when he trains. No surprise movements. No extra spectators. Just his waterbending and earthbending teachers, plus a couple dummy fighters to launch pretend attacks with swords.

“‘Dummy’?” Zuko had protested.

Sokka replied, “It’s a technical term, don’t worry. They call me that too!”

So when Aang temporarily tires of firebending- and within a couple days he’s learned all the introductory katas with flame, and though he knows he should be over it Zuko’s heart stings- Toph claims him and drags everyone else along. Everyone but Uncle, whom they leave with Appa. 

All of them sneak off to an isolated field, and Zuko can’t help smiling. He nearly bubbles over with excitement, because Toph’s offered to teach him alongside Aang.

Zuko’s finally going to be a good earthbender.

/

Lee is never going to be a good earthbender. Never. No way.

Now, Toph considers herself the best earthbender in the world and also the best earthbending teacher in the world, so it’s saying a lot that she’s writing Lee off as a lost cause. She first suspected his unteachability when she kindly raised a massive boulder out of the ground with a single stomp, as a demonstration of prime earthbending technique-

“Toph?” he says. “Your bending’s really loud.”

Toph grins toothily. “Thank you.”

“No, I mean...Could you maybe tone it down a bit?”

She drops the boulder with a mighty crash, and he outright jumps. “Excuse me?”

“It feels like an earthquake every time.”

She rounds on him, hands on hips, fuming because she can’t even figure out exactly where he _is._ He’s still so quiet she can’t feel his feet on the ground. If anyone gets to complain around here, it’s her.

“I’m sorry,” she says, aiming generally in the direction of his voice, “I didn’t realize your feet were so _sensitive._ Do you get daily pedicures to keep them soft?”

“...Look. I’m not the rock expert here-“

“No kidding.”

“But has it occurred to you,” he barrels on like she hadn’t spoken, and maybe he _has_ got a bit of earthbending spirit, “that we’re going on a stealth mission, so you could stand to be a little quieter?”

Toph’s eyebrows jump. In the background Sokka goes, “Oooh.”

She scowls at Lee and imagines him scrambling back in terror, though she can’t feel it. 

Things go downhill from there. She “tones it down” and he doesn’t complain again, but his stance feels worse than an airbender’s- lots of twirling spins, lots of loose limbs and light feet. She can’t sense his posture exactly, but it’s the only explanation for why he can’t lift a rock more than an inch off the ground. Why he can’t do anything but _dance around._

“Hey, Lee, why are you breathing like that?” Sokka calls from the peanut gallery. 

“Like what?” Toph can feel him breathing when he’s sitting or lying down, but when he’s standing? Zip.

“I’m taking extra-deep breaths,” Lee answers. “To help ground my bending.”

Toph slaps her face with both hands. “Earthbending comes from your muscles, forget the breathing!”

Lee splutters back at her. “But good breathing gives you power.”

“Power comes from the stance, not the lungs.”

“Sure, let’s stop breathing and see how our bending improves.“

“All you need,” Toph huffs, “is willpower. You tell the earth what to do and it does it.”

“It’s not-“

“What?”

“It’s not just a _tool.”_ Lee’s weirdly earnest. “It’s not all you moving the earth, sometimes it moves for you. It’s a reflection of your spirit.”

“Oh,” Toph says in singsong, “does the nice rock care about your feelings?”

“Maybe it does!”

“What kinda touchy-feely dance class do you think this is, _firebending?”_

“Hey,” Aang interjects, his own training abandoned. “Could it be that you’re getting at the same truth from different angles, and so you’re both right?”

_“No!”_

It’s the first thing they agree on.

/

Zuko collapses like a rock into his sleeping bag that night. Like every single rock Toph told him to levitate all day.

“Nephew, how was the training?”

“I...I mean, Aang did great. His waterbending alone should be enough to take out a firebender during the eclipse.”

“And how are you?”

“Never been better.” He burrows under the flap of the sleeping bag, covering his head before Uncle can drill any further.

Uncle.

“Uncle.”

Zuko’s trying to correct himself, at least in the quiet of his own head.

Because Ozai’s words will resound forever in his mind _(you are no son of mine),_ and now Azula’s have joined them. She always was so good at sizing up an opponent and slipping right between the cracks of their armor, knowing them better than they knew themselves.

_You’re a bastard._

Zuko always was slow about these things. He wonders if he was the last to know, the last to guess the secret. The last to notice he was branded not just by the scar but by this hidden family shame.

For the line of Sozin is nothing but firebenders. Ursa, daughter of Jinzuk and Rina, would never have been permitted to marry a prince if her family tree wasn’t full-blooded Fire Nation for the past seven generations. There is only one explanation for how her son could be an earthbender.

Ozai is no father of his.

And it’s fanciful, but Zuko’s can’t stop imagining what it must have been like. Her bid at freedom from Ozai’s strangling grip. Her stolen moments with his true father. Realistically, he would have been an Earth Kingdom noble, perhaps from a newly subjugated colony. He would have been high-ranking enough to visit the Fire Nation palace for some diplomatic matter or another, to stray close to the wife of a prince.

(Zuko hopes she loved him.)

Zuko is an earthbender by blood. He is, in all likelihood, an Earth Kingdom noble by birthright. He was _never_ a prince of the Fire Nation, was never part of the royal family’s careless, backstabbing violence, was never fated to serve the Fire Nation. When he closes his eyes he can still pretend the island’s breathing with him, the way the ground of the Earth Kingdom never did. But it’s a childish daydream. This land was never his, and it’s foolish to pretend otherwise. 

His home is the Earth Kingdom. His loyalty- his honor- belongs solely to the Earth Kingdom. 

His destiny is clear.

/

Zuko is decidedly not invited to the Avatar’s earthbending practice today. He tags along anyway. Toph ignores him until he gets up the courage to call her name.

“Toph?”

Whirling around, she snaps, _“What_ do you think you’re doing here?”

“I’m sorry for my behavior yesterday.” He’s genuinely contrite, and he bows, just in case she can tell. “You were right, I was thinking like...not like an earthbender. If you are still willing to teach me the bending traditions of the Earth Kingdom, I would be honored.”

He straightens up and finds her looking doubtfully at him. 

“You promise to knock it off with the mystical feeling talk?”

“Yes.”

“And can you press on the ground a little harder when you take a step?”

Zuko looks down at his shoes, bewildered. “Can I ask why?”

“Because I can’t keep track of you right now, which is bad for sparring.” She kicks one dusty bare foot up towards his face, giving him a nice whiff. “It’s an advanced earthbending technique! I see things with my feet.”

“That makes sense.”

“It does?” Sokka asks. Nobody answers him.

Zuko takes a couple tentative steps in place, trying to let a little more sound out of his footfalls. “Like that?”

Toph wiggles her toes. “I can work with that. Get into your stance.”

He obeys. “You got it, Master Toph.”


	9. Chapter 9

Their merry little band sneaks through the Fire Nation, heading steadily towards Caldera. Uncle assures them that there’ll be no trouble breaking into the city if they can simply reach the port of the nearest major island. “I once played  _ pai sho _ with the kind lady who runs the local ticket office. She will surely grant us tickets to the capital.”

Zuko’s eyebrow shoots up. “You know her well enough for that?”

“Of course,” Uncle says with a jolly laugh. “All of us old people know each other.”

They slip through one island after another, traveling slowly and carefully to avoid suspicion, steering clear of all major cities and thoroughfares.

That means traveling through backroads and backwater towns starved by misfortune and the Fire Nation’s neglect, places that have less in common with the glitter of Caldera than most of the Earth Kingdom does. Uncle- older, rounder and less well-kempt than he was before, and correspondingly difficult to recognize- chaperones the Avatar and his friends around the towns to gather supplies, kindly but firmly steering them away from trouble. Zuko stays behind with Appa. His burn scar’s distinctive, and though he thinks his so-called homeland has forgotten their ex-prince he doesn’t intend to press his luck.

He waits with Appa on the shore of what might’ve once been a river and currently looks like a flowing garbage dump. He’s not sure what food will be available here, but his limited hopes get dashed by the group’s expressions, as they trudge back to camp.

“What happened?” Zuko asks.

“Life is too fragile,” Uncle responds, “to gamble with a two-headed fish.”

Zuko frowns. “I don’t know what that metaphor means.”

“It isn’t a metaphor,” Katara says with a sickened look. She reaches into her box of supplies and pulls out a fish that really has two heads.

“...I think I’ll just stick to tea for dinner,” Zuko says.

“Yay,” Sokka cheers, “more heads for me!”

/

Turns out the town’s half-dead from sickness, like the local fish.

Turns out it’s because of a munitions factory set down the river, its toxic runoff poisoning everything in sight.

Turns out there’s a few healthy-looking berry bushes nearby. Zuko snacks on berries instead of fish and slips the remainder to Uncle. They exchange looks the next morning, when Katara demonstrates Appa’s mysteriously berry-colored purple tongue, but they don’t say anything when she insists Appa’s sick so they have to stay another day.

“The whole town’s so much happier now,” she reports with delight after the day’s excursion. “Last night, a spirit brought them all food that  _ isn’t  _ going to kill them. They call her the ‘Painted Lady.’”

“Whoever they may be,” Uncle says, “they have a very kind heart.”

Zuko doesn’t miss Katara’s sudden blush.

She’s probably the Painted Lady, but Zuko won’t deny her the chance to play secret hero. He watches her take off that night, bending her way across the river to the village for some other well-meaning rescue mission. Zuko has no doubt she’ll help these people- especially if she brings her healing skills to bear- but there’s a limit to what her interventions can accomplish. Temporary help is just that- temporary.

The village needs a more permanent solution.

Zuko creeps away from the camp too, towards the factory itself. It’s a monstrous metal fortress. A perfect manifestation of the Fire Nation war machine. Zuko breaks in easily, just opens a seam in the wall and walks through, and he prowls the base of the factory. It’s like Tingting’s forge, just a hundred times bigger, and within a couple minutes of sneaking he finds the main hearth, currently extinguished for the night.

A couple taps verify that the surrounding walls are load-bearing. If they fail, the entire building will too.

Zuko tightens a few screws, leaving the metal no room to expand when it next heats up. He reaches in to invisible weaknesses in the steel innards, and he systematically deepens the rifts. The whole time, he thinks of a single cabbage slug, capable of slaughtering an entire ecosystem. He thinks of a hypothetical dam.

He creeps back into camp, whole body buzzing with excitement. Careless, he collides with Katara. 

Not literally, he spots her several feet out and stops walking before the physical impact, but he can see her clearly, emerging from the river. She can see him clearly, his twin dao outlined by moonlight.

He speaks first, stepping forth and addressing her in a discreet murmur. “I was just getting some earthbending practice in. Give Toph less reason to chew me out next time.”

She lifts her chin. “I was practicing waterbending. It’s easier after dark.”

They nod at each other before awkwardly retiring for the night.

Zuko can’t sleep. He gets up after an hour of trying, and so he’s stoking the fire for breakfast when the factory starts its own central fire for the day.

_ Crack. _

Maybe Zuko can hear it, or maybe it’s his imagination- the distinct series of crashes as one floor of the factory collapses after another, flattening the entire structure. As the others wake up, he tries to copy their looks of shock and horror.

“What happened?” Zuko says.

Toph frowns. “Felt like a massive explosion to me.”

Aang zooms out to a better vantage point. A minute later he returns, panting, a cloud of smoke now rising in the distance behind him. “The factory blew up!”

“Huh,” Sokka says thoughtfully. “Whaddya know, the spirit did something actually  _ useful.” _

Katara turns on him, suppressing fury. “What do you mean, ‘actually useful’?”

He answers with a blissfully oblivious shrug. “Free food’s nice and all, but taking out the factory’s way better for lasting change.”

She scoffs and crosses her arms. Zuko smiles, until suddenly she looks at him, suspicious. He schools his own features into a look of equal suspicion, directed squarely at her.

“Whoever sparked this explosion, spirit or not,” Uncle says, “I hope they considered the smiths who were inside at the time. From the sound, there was no surviving a blast of that magnitude.”

Zuko glances at him, but Uncle’s gaze is firmly fixed on the traveler’s tea set in his lap, his words addressed to no one in particular.

/

A meteor crashes into the valley next to them.

A meteor crashes, and because traveling with the Avatar means giving up all sense and self-preservation, they  _ run towards the blaze. _

There’s metal in the meteorite, and Zuko tries feeling for it and asking it to cool down, but he gives up on that fast. Uncle straight-up bends heat away, and Aang and Toph earthbend the meteorite down into a pit, and Katara dumps half a river on it.

Zuko helps Sokka babysit Momo.

Sokka mopes after that. Katara tries bribing him with meat, and Uncle tries bribing him with cloudberry tea, and still he broods in the corner like their own personal raincloud.

“You all can do this awesome bending stuff,” he whines to Uncle. “Aang’s got his Avatar powers, and Katara just controls the ocean now, and Toph has her rocks and metal and Lee has his…”

Sitting behind Uncle, Zuko throws Sokka a glare of warning. 

“His swordbending,” Sokka says, wincing as everyone behind Uncle rolls their eyes. “I don’t have  _ any _ of that.”

“But you have an eye for detail,” Uncle says. “A wisdom beyond your years, a creative spirit, and a fine sense of wordplay!”

“It’s not the same,” Sokka moans.

Uncle moves to sit down closer to him, but he doesn’t lower his voice. Sitting on the other side of the table, Zuko can still hear every word.

“It is never easy,” Uncle tells him, “to be the nail that sticks out, for the world will try to hammer you into place. But there is no shame in not bending at all- or bending differently from those around you- because your differences give you a unique perspective. You are a unique strand in the story of this age, and we are glad to have you exactly as you are.”

(Zuko casts his eyes down. This speech isn’t meant for him.)

Sokka takes it all in and offers Uncle a tentative nod.

“Do you know what always comforts me?” Uncle adds. “A trip to the marketplace.”

Zuko can’t help laughing, because Sokka shoots right to his feet like a brand new man. _ “Shopping?!” _

/

Zuko does not want to go shopping.

Zuko tugs his cloak’s hood far down and goes shopping, both as a show of moral support and to save the group’s wallet. Sokka makes a beeline for a high-end weapons shop, immediately buys a sleek wooden boomerang, and then tries out every other weapon in sight.

“You should totally get a nunchaku,” Zuko deadpans, leaning casually against a pillar. “Fastest way to guarantee a concussion.”

“Yeah!” Sokka cheers, before frowning. “Wait, is the concussion for me or my opponent?”

/

“No, put  _ down _ the kama. You can’t even handle one yet, what do you think you’ll do with two?”

“I’ll get you to teach me!”

/

“Do not even  _ think _ about touching that sword.”

Sokka promptly puts his hands all over the sword in question- a long gorgeous blade, its sheath engraved with a golden dragon. From his first glance Zuko knows that it’s expensive enough to bankrupt them. He squints harder, because there’s something oddly familiar about the metalwork.

“You have a good eye,” says the shopkeeper. “That’s an original from Piandao, the greatest swordmaster and sword maker in Fire Nation history.”

/

Toph’s paying all her attention to Sokka’s shopping spree. Not because Sokka’s trying to buy the whole shop- nothing new to see there, even if she could see- but because Lee’s leaning against a stone column right now, and that means she can sense him as plainly as anyone else. 

She can sense him plainly, and yet she can’t make sense of what she finds.

As a rule Lee’s feet are creepily silent, invisible to her unless he’s specifically  _ trying _ to make noise during earthbending lessons. He’s soft-spoken, quiet by nature, fond of planning every word he says and waiting for just the right moment to speak. So it’s  _ weird _ that his heart spends most of its time screaming. At the slightest sign of tension or even just new information, it pounds like a drill.

It pounds loudest when Mister Mushi- a.k.a the most calming person alive- speaks.

“You can’t go wrong with a sword from Master Piandao,” Mister Mushi tells Sokka. Across the room, Lee’s pulse starts thundering like an avalanche.

Maybe Lee’s just terrified about his secret earthbending. He was dead-serious, when he made them vow to keep that little fact quiet if they wanted Aang to learn firebending. Toph doesn’t intend to break that promise, but she doesn’t  _ get _ it either. She’s the loudest, awesomest earthbender around and- unlike a certain someone- Mister Mushi’s never once asked her to tone it down. Sure, his pulse speeds up sometimes when a rock comes hurtling out of nowhere, but he doesn’t know that she notices it. With his outward actions, with his proverbs and advice and tea, he’s nothing but supportive.

And yet Lee- Lee, who jumped into battle against Azula two times like he was waiting for it, like he knew  _ exactly _ what he was getting into- is running scared.

And yet he’s not even  _ literally _ running scared! He’s just hanging out with Aang and the group. He’s palling around. Tagging along. Waiting for spirits know what. 

That’s a whole pile-up of contradictory facts right there. A bunch of puzzle pieces that don’t fit, with big gaping fault lines. Toph knows a thing or two about warped family dynamics, but she can’t make heads or tails of whatever’s going on there.

“Hey, Lee,” Sokka comments as he unsheathes the pretty sword with a  _ shing,  _ “this craftsmanship looks exactly like your twin  _ dao.” _

The shopkeeper scoffs. “Piandao’s craftsmanship is extraordinary. Only an amateur could confuse it with someone else’s.”

Toph can feel Sokka deflate, like a popped war balloon.

“You’re right, Sokka,” Lee says after a second, sounding utterly reluctant about it. “Piandao made my  _ dao.” _

“Then you are lucky!” the shopkeeper now gasps. “Piandao rarely crafts dual weapons. I hear he only makes them for the highest-paying Fire Nation nobles!”

Lee snorts. “Hate to disappoint, but I haven’t got a drop of Fire Nation noble blood in me.”

By default his pulse is unhealthily quick, but it doesn’t ratchet up any further. He’s telling the truth. Yet as he says it, Mister Mushi’s heart starts doing gymnastics that are honestly worrying, at his age.

It’s the _ weirdest. _

/

Zuko doesn’t know how they got from “you can’t afford that sword” to “you should crash into Master Piandao’s mansion and get him to personally coach you,” but he’s not  _ that _ surprised. Nothing in this group makes perfect sense. Especially not with Uncle’s meddling- he immediately decides to give Sokka a personal escort to Master Piandao’s house. Zuko doesn’t get it, but there’s no arguing with Uncle once he’s got that resolute glint in his eye.

For his part, Zuko does  _ not _ go traipsing into his old master’s house, because he’s changed a lot over the past seven years but he can’t risk recognition. He stays behind, hopes that  _ Uncle _ won’t be recognized and seizes the chance to have more earthbending lessons.

“Look,” Toph declares, “it’s not that hard. You just move your hand up and the rock goes up, and you move your hand down and the rock goes down.”

“But why do you have to move your hand?” Zuko asks. “Do badgermoles move  _ their _ hands?”

“Are you  _ honestly _ comparing your skills to a badgermole’s?” Toph snaps, just as Aang says, “Do badgermoles even  _ have _ hands?”

With one look at Toph’s expression, Zuko gets into his stance and lifts his hands, mentally ordering the pebbles in front of him to move.

They don’t.

He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath in, and  _ imagines _ them rising, like a gentle suggestion. Aang and Katara cheer, and Zuko opens his eyes just in time to see pebbles floating in midair before they crash back down. Toph grants him a smile of actual pride.

“That was great. Now do it again with twice as many pebbles for twice the time!”

It works, kind of. He can’t lift all the stones evenly to the same height, and he can’t get  _ any _ of them to rise over his knee, but they respond to his visualizations, even if he has his eyes closed. Especially if he has his eyes closed. Up. Down. Up. Down.

(He times his breaths with the movements, inhaling with every “up,” releasing the stones with each well-controlled exhale. Toph doesn’t need to know that.)

/

After the Piandao incident’s over, Uncle- accompanied by Sokka, for some reason- procures the forged tickets they need to sneak into Caldera. Then, the entire group camps out on a picturesque beach, with nothing to do but relax for four days until they face the Fire Lord.

This, naturally, is when Aang freaks out.

Zuko shoots upright in the middle of the night, awakened by Aang, who’s decided it’s the best time to kick a bush. Repeatedly. Loudly. Just a couple feet from Zuko’s head.

“If you want to murder a shrub,” he whispers, “try using a knife.” 

Aang spins around, eyes wide in apology and maybe terror. 

“I’m sorry,” he stage-whispers back.

“Is something wrong?”

“Yes,” Aang says. “I mean, no.”

Still half-asleep himself, Zuko collapses like a rock, back against his sleeping bag. “Let me know when you figure it out.”

He falls back asleep eventually, tuning out the entire world until Aang wakes everyone up at sunrise.

By trying to murder a tree with his bare fists.

“Hey,” Zuko calls. “I told you to use a knife.”

Katara glowers at him before approaching Aang more gently. “Hey, how long have you been up?”

“A couple hours,” Aang pants. “I’ve got a lot more skills to refine if I'm gonna fight Ozai!”

He stops punching the tree trunk. A second later, all the branches crack and fall on his head.

“Great,” Zuko grumbles, yawning. Normally he’s up at sunrise anyway- he’s not a firebender with an “inner flame” for an alarm clock, but it must be a bad habit drilled into him in childhood. After the interrupted night though, he really meant to sleep in.  “If Ozai’s a redwood, we’ll know exactly what to do.”

“What if he  _ is?” _ Aang yelps.

Zuko stares at him. “Excuse me?”

“I haven’t seen him!” Aang says, now jumping on an air scooter and speeding around in dizzying circles. “I don’t know what he looks like. He could be a redwood, or, or a goldfish, and I’d have no clue!”

“It’s a real problem,” Sokka says from the side. “My last girlfriend turned into the moon. And also maybe a koi fish, I’m not sure about that part.”

“The Fire Nation is not ruled by a  _ goldfish,”  _ Zuko says, trying desperately to stay stone-faced. “And if he becomes a goldfish, we’ll let his darling daughter take care of him. He’ll go belly-up within the day.” He chuckles to himself and then finds  _ all _ the kids staring at him in horror. “What?”

“I am afraid the Fire Lord is a man,” comes Uncle’s voice. “No more, and no less.”

“But what does he  _ look _ like?” Aang blurts. “I don’t know. How would I know? I don’t pal around with the guy! What if I break into Caldera and I think someone else is Ozai and I murder someone completely innocent?”

“If they’re in Caldera,” Sokka jokes, “are they completely innocent?”

Zuko laughs.

“But then Ozai would be running around free at the end! And the eclipse would be over! And the entire world will _ burn!” _

Aang shoots twenty feet into the air, for emphasis.

“How about we get you a history book,” Katara says brightly once he returns to earth, “with pictures of the royal family?”

“Uh,” Zuko says.

“Uh,” Uncle says, before more cogently adding, “that is not necessary. I have seen precisely such a book and can describe the Fire Lord to you.” Everyone turns to him expectantly, and he stumbles. “He looks...he looks…” Uncle looks around, a little desperate. “He looks like Lee.”

_ “What?” _ everyone else squawks. 

Zuko’s the loudest. “I look  _ nothing _ like the Fire Lord!”

“Of course there are differences,” Uncle says, a little surprised. “Your jaw is slightly softer-”

“He’s old and he’s massive,” Zuko snaps.

“He is a foot taller at the most, and not nearly as old as I am.”

“He’s a lot more like  _ you _ than  _ me-” _

“In my dreams,” Aang interrupts, “he’s got a big spiky beard and spiky eyebrows to match and big dark eyes, and he’s huge in every direction!”

Uncle blinks at him. “That...sounds slightly more like Fire Lord Sozin, who was known for his broad frame and his elaborate facial hair. You knew him well in your past life, so perhaps Avatar Roku is attempting to pass on some wisdom-”

“If you squint, maybe I look a little like my- like Ozai,” Zuko cuts in, dripping sarcasm. “You know, if you got rid of the massive disfiguring scar.”

Toph whips her head around. “What scar?”

“Half my face is burned off,” Zuko intones. “I promise you Ozai’s isn’t.”

He says it wryly. For a moment, no one else talks.

“Okay then,” says Sokka. “Got any other specifics? Hair color?”

“Black. He keeps it long, with a top-knot to show his status,” Uncle adds. “He also wore a narrow beard, last I heard.”

“Eye color?”

“Gold,” Zuko replies. “It’s a thing.”

“But  _ tons  _ of people in the Fire Nation have black hair and kinda golden eyes,” Aang splutters.

“But his eyes are  _ pure _ gold-”

“So what, our only choice is to look deep into the Fire Lord’s eyes?” Toph snarks.

“This doesn’t _help,”_ Aang cries in despair. “I could still get him confused with someone else! There’s no way to guarantee I’ve killed him unless I just destroy all of Caldera...”

_ That’s an idea,  _ Zuko thinks privately.

“Just look for the crown,” he says aloud. “Gold. Shaped like this.” He traces the outline with his finger in the dust, the five-tongued flame that glimmers on the backs of his eyelids all these years later. “The crown’s your safest bet. He’ll wear it in his top knot, ‘til the day he dies.” 

For some reason, Aang droops at this news. “...thanks, Lee. That’s really helpful.”

He plops on the floor like he’s about to cry, and Zuko buries his head in his sleeping bag again. It was a good tip, about the crown. He was genuinely trying to be helpful.

Uncle sighs and sweeps Aang off for a tea session and a nice candle meditation. Afterwards, their twelve-year-old Avatar seems like himself again.

/

Until the next night.

Zuko wakes up  _ again. _ This time  _ everyone _ wakes up, because Aang lets out a blood-curdling shriek more strident than Azula’s lightning.

“It’s the nightmares,” he protests. “They got worse!”

“What did you see?” Uncle queries, rushing to his side. “Perhaps there is some meaning to your dreams. Some portent of the future-”

“Ozai made me take a  _ math test!”  _ Aang exclaims.

“That’s not going to happen,” Zuko mutters.

“And then he smashed my head with the abacus!”

“...Actually, I can’t rule it out.”

“And Sokka, you have to practice climbing because you fell off a cliff and died, and Katara, you gotta cut your hair loopies because they’ll get caught in a wheel, and Toph, you’re going to get crushed by rocks, and Mister Mushi, you can’t make any more tea because during the eclipse the fire  _ grows out of control _ and you can’t bend it away!”

“I’m feeling a little left out,” Zuko jokes.

Aang whirls around to face him, childish features stricken by sorrow.

“I...I didn’t dream about you. Not even a little bit.”

It’s a lie. Zuko shrugs it off and goes back to sleep.

(At least one of them should be rested for what’s about to happen.)

/

Uncle gathers them all for a tea party the next day, presumably staging an intervention. “We are all proud of you, Aang. You have mastered all four elements, and you have the power and wisdom of all prior Avatars to guide you. It is your fate to restore balance and eliminate the Fire Lord.”

Wringing his hands, Aang completely ignores his calming cup of jasmine. “That’s the problem. I don’t want to do that anymore.”

Everyone stares at him. In his sleep-deprived state, he doesn’t really seem to notice. 

“I know I  _ should _ kill the Fire Lord,” Aang says, dropping his chin into his hands. “That’s my fate, my legacy, yadda yadda yadda. But I don’t even eat meat! I  _ can’t  _ kill a person. And Ozai is a person, isn’t he?”

Zuko beats everyone to the punchline: “Do you want my honest opinion on that?”

“He’s someone’s son,” Aang protests.

“Pretty sure he killed his dad,” Zuko replies.

“He must have a wife…”

“She ran away,” says Uncle.

“He has kids, right? He’s got a daughter.”

“Yeah,” Sokka comments, “‘cause she turned out so great. Real testament to his parenting, right there.”

“If he treats children anything like he treats the world,” Zuko murmurs, eyes focused on the flames heating the teapot, “then he’s cruel. Arbitrary. One day he ignores you and the next you’re on fire.”

“It’s hard to go against the Fire Lord if you think of him that way.” Katara places a hand on Aang’s knee. “Fighting family is the worst crime I can think of. But he’s not  _ your _ family. In fact, it’s his bloodline that  _ destroyed _ your family. You don’t owe him anything.”

There’s a pensive silence.

“...But,” Uncle says, as Zuko lightly considers poisoning his tea, “if you feel you  _ cannot _ kill the Fire Lord as a matter of conscience, there may be other options.”

Aang’s eyes light up with hope, for the first time since they started their peaceful beach vacation. “Like what?”

“Maybe we can just imprison him?” Sokka offers.

Katara adds, “We could drug him for long enough to lock him up.”

“There is a secure fortress in central Caldera, perfect for such a purpose,” says Uncle.

“I heard a lady in town selling shirshu poison darts,” Toph recalls with relish. “Ozai’s got some sweet, sweet paralysis coming his way.”

They start clamoring over each other, proposing increasingly non-violent solutions for dealing with the Fire Lord (“Maybe we won’t even have to shoot him, and he’ll just drink the sedative when we ask!”). Zuko stays conspicuously silent, face hardening to a scowl.

/

Zuko sleeps with his shoes on. He always does, and Sokka’s started copying him (“it’s good to be prepared, what if Azula starts waking us up again?”), and it’s easy enough to shift so the metal soles are touching the ground.

He sleeps with his metal shoes on, so he wakes up as soon as Aang does. A couple minutes later, Aang rises from his sleeping bag. Quietly, Zuko follows him away from the camp, squatting down beside him.

“What’s wrong now?”

“I dreamt that we overdid the shirshu poison,” Aang mumbles, “and then he died of an overdose before we could even get him to jail.”

Zuko does not holler profanities at a stressed-out, insomniac twelve-year-old, but it’s a close call.

“It’s not...the end of the world if that happens,” he says tentatively. “He did awful things to your people, why are you so upset about this?”

“Because it’s _my people_ who said I shouldn’t take a life,” Aang answers, painfully earnest. “And because…”

“What?”

Aang winces, rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s stupid, but ever since you and Mister Mushi told me about Ozai’s looks, every nightmare I have now casts the Fire Lord...as you.”

Zuko reels back, stunned to silence.

“But I’m not-“

“Related to Ozai at all, I  _ know,  _ I just. I just don’t think it’s my destiny to murder the Fire Lord.”

Zuko lets out a long sigh, closing his eyes. He breathes in. Out.

“I’m not as spiritual as my uncle,” he says at last, offering Aang a small, sincere smile. “But I think you might be right.”


	10. Chapter 10

Zuko studied tactics in the Fire Nation’s war room. He can launch an outright assault, it’s true, but he appreciates the value of deception and surprise.

He seizes his chance during earthbending practice, addressing all the kids with his most innocent expression. “Uncle will want to come on the invasion, but you can’t let him.”

“Why not?” says Aang.

“Because he’s just an old man,” Zuko replies, pouring all his effort into sounding sincere. “And I know he’s your firebending teacher, and he’s taught you all these moves-“

“That he learned in combat, right?” Sokka cuts in.

“...Yeah, he’s been in fights before, But that was a long time ago, and nowadays his main enemies are teamakers who scald their leaves,” Zuko jokes. As they all chuckle, he leans back against a tree, trying his best to play it casual. “And he’s going to be as affected by the eclipse as all the other firebenders. He’ll lose his inner flame, and he’ll just be a defenseless old man. If we bring him into a Fire Nation stronghold in that condition, who knows what could happen?”

Most of the kids agree after a second.

Katara sums it up: “We can’t let them hurt Mister Mushi.”

Zuko nods.

He can’t risk the next Fire Lord dying during the coup.

“You’re lying,” Toph says with a sudden frown.

He straightens up, pushing away from the tree trunk. “I’m not lying!”

She crosses her arms and lets out a huff that wiggles her bangs. “Fine. But you were hiding something.”

As the other three turn questioning stares on him, Zuko rolls his eyes. “Fine. I didn’t want to mention this given Aang’s nerves, but it could be useful to have someone else around to stop Ozai if we fail.”

“But what would Mister Mushi do?” Katara asks.

“I don’t know.” Zuko shrugs. “Pour tea down Ozai’s throat and hope it warms his frozen heart?”

“Oh!” Sokka pipes up. “He could invite him to a duel! A Fire Rumble! An...Agnes something.”

That startles a laugh out of Zuko, sharp and bright. “Yeah, something like that.”

/

He springs the ambush. All the other kids besiege Uncle on the morning before the boat to Caldera leaves, one day before the eclipse, expressing deep concerns for an old man’s health and safety. Zuko doesn’t even say anything, just watches from afar as the four most persistent children he knows- excepting, perhaps, Azula- insist that he _has_ to stay out of the conflict, safely away from the battleground where kindly tea-making uncles belong. Uncle protests over and over again, but they wear him down.

“Nephew,” he says quietly, grasping Zuko by the elbow in a brief moment alone, “Please, I beg you. Do not betray the Avatar.”

For a moment, Zuko’s brain short-circuits. It takes time to remember how this mess originally started, with orders for him to chase down the Avatar and obediently return him to the Fire Nation. 

At last, he straightens up and looks Uncle in the eyes. “I’m not going to let Ozai get his hands on Aang. I swear it on my honor.”

He shrugs off Uncle’s hand. He wraps his swords around him when the others aren’t looking, unflinching steel hidden under the cool red silk of his cloak. He laces up his dancing shoes. He tucks his opera mask safely into his bag, out of sight.

Quietly, he hands over his ticket and boards a boat to Caldera, passing the Great Gates of Azulon and hiding the subtle quake of his hands.

/

Caldera’s precisely as he remembers. Opulent. Full of greenery. Unscarred by the war.

By nightfall, they check into an inn on the outskirts that Uncle had recommended, and it’s a testament to the gravity of the moment that nobody proposes any juvenile shenanigans. Aang only steps out briefly, to eavesdrop.

“There’s an Earth Kingdom attack,” he informs them. “King Kuei’s sent ships. They think the only threat is at sea.”

“Perfect.”

Zuko says it under his breath, so quiet only Toph hears him.

Aang might not rest tonight, but Zuko does, falling softly into sleep, lulled by his own breaths. 

Up. Down. In. Out.

/

Zuko wears his _dao_ openly on his back, with a few other blades hidden on his person. He dons his mask and ties back his braid. Aang shaves his head, Sokka readies his boomerangs, and Katara fills a few extra flasks with water. They slip out of the inn.

They head down the side of the volcano while it’s still dark, sneaking around the guards prowling the city streets, just in case. Toph goes around in circles for a while before honing in on a path that’ll get them to the bunker, without crossing any actual tunnels or running into guards. Once she’s satisfied, she opens a hole in the side of the volcano, and they follow her down. Toph leads the way, opening up a path- silently, Zuko didn’t even know she could be so delicate with her bending- while Aang closes off the path behind them. They leave no trace of their presence as they drill down towards the heart of the volcano. Towards Ozai, the supposed heart of the Fire Nation.

“There’s a big hall right below us,” Toph comments, running her hands along the floor. “I feel someone down there. Someone big. Probably on a throne.”

“Alone?” Zuko asks.

“Yeah.”

“Not him- he’ll have guards. That’s a decoy.”

“Sneaky,” Sokka comments, rubbing his hands in apparent admiration.

They keep burrowing until Toph finds another large room. Zuko casually knocks his heel against the wall. The hall’s just on the other side, and it feels _huge._ There’s a row of twelve people standing in a perfect line. Behind them, one person’s sitting alone like an island.

As Toph quietly describes the scene to everyone else, Zuko lifts his hand and rests it against the wall, reaching towards the lone figure.

“That could be him,” Katara murmurs.

There’s a noise from inside- someone speaking. None of the words are distinct, all blurred together by the layers of rock and metal, but Zuko would know that voice anywhere- dark and brazen, each syllable laced with danger.

Then there’s a laugh. 

Zuko can’t help the quake that runs through his whole body.

“Whoa, Lee.” Sokka places a bracing hand on his shoulder. “You okay?”

“Never better.”

“Is that the Fire Lord?” Aang asks them all.

Zuko holds his tongue as everyone else vacillates.

“If you want,” Zuko finally says after a couple minutes’ hushed deliberation, “you can search the rest of the bunker in case he’s somewhere else. I’ll wait here.”

He drops to the ground, arms wrapped around his knees with his soles passed hard against the floor. His eye glints stubbornly, like he’s daring them to try and move him.

“I’ll stay too,” Katara says in hushed tones. “You three can keep looking.”

Toph, Aang and Sokka carry on with their quest. True to her word, Katara stays by Zuko.

“Hey,” she whispers, “how are you? You wanna talk?”

“Next to Ozai and the Imperial Firebenders? I don’t think so.” 

Shutting Katara out, he closes his eyes and slips into meditation, pushing down the shifting tides in his head. It’s difficult work. His whole body’s thrumming, as if possessed by some furious blaze that’s _larger_ than him, as if his every vein is flooded by liquid fire-

The other three creep back. 

“I think this is him,” Aang reports.

Sokka adds, “I heard them planning a counterattack on the Earth Kingdom navy. Sounds like no one suspects us.”

“Toph,” Zuko says, not even opening his eyes, “wall Ozai off from his guards when the eclipse starts.”

“Who died and made you king?” Toph hisses back.

Zuko does a full-body flinch.

“It’s a good idea.” Sokka defends him, thankfully. “For now, let’s just sit quiet and wait.”

So Zuko waits. He breathes, fully aware that he’s losing his mind a little with every passing second, that he can _feel all the walls_ breathing with him.

(He wonders if it’s the effects of volcanic gas, but nobody else seems to be going off the rails. Not like him.)

Still Zuko holds himself together, waiting, until something goes dark inside him. Until their carefully synchronized watches all confirm it’s time.

Toph raises the wall inside the room, blocking off the guards. Then she smashes her way into the bunker and they bust through, Zuko hiding in the rear, mask tied carefully in place. Aang leads the way. He bounds across the hall to Ozai, who’s sitting on a central raised pedestal, because _of_ _course_ he is.

There’s one odd moment, as the guards trapped on the other side start shouting and chipping away at the rock. Their fruitless scuffle seems miles away, dulled by the wall between them. 

They’re irrelevant.

What matters is the Avatar. Aang stands before Ozai, hands on his hips, the blue arrow proud on his cleanly shaved head. Arranging his features in his most serious scowl, he fires his opening salvo.

“Are you Fire Lord Ozai?”

Zuko nearly boils over laughing. 

He stays silent and notes the same amusement flickering across Ozai’s face. His lips quirk into the slightest smile as he lifts a teacup to his lips and takes a lazy sip. He scans the group, eyes skimming right over Zuko’s mask as he grants Aang all his attention.

“Perhaps I am,” he says.

“He’s got the crown,” Sokka points out.

“Every royal of the Fire Nation wears a crown,” Ozai answers, perfectly calm. “There are only subtle differences between them. Perhaps I’m the Fire Lord, or perhaps I’m the gentle older brother, Iroh. Would you care for a cup of tea?”

Behind the mask, Zuko scowls as he pours out a cup of definitely-poisoned tea.

“Thank you,” Aang says, a little confused, “but I drank water before coming.”

Discreetly, Zuko glances at his watch. Seven minutes left.

Ozai shrugs, and drinks it himself. Huh.

“You look like the Fire Lord to me,” Sokka says. “So you know what comes next.”

“I sincerely can’t imagine,” Ozai replies dryly.

“You’re under arrest-” Katara draws forth the water from one of her flasks, threatening him like a sensible person- “under the authority of the Avatar.”

“That sounds very official,” he remarks, with a smile that’s only subtly patronizing. “But as your research on the Fire Lord’s appearance seems lacking, I wonder how well-versed you are in Fire Nation law...”

He trails off, daring them to pry.

Aang breaks first. “What do you mean?”

“Our form of government is based on the divine right to rule. Perhaps you believe the legends, that Agni grants authority to the royal family alone, or perhaps you don’t. Frankly-“ he takes another leisurely sip- “your beliefs on the subject don’t matter. What matters is that the _people_ believe deeply. The ministers. The officials who control the military.” 

Aang shifts uncomfortably. “Where are you going with this?”

“I admit, the details of your no doubt brilliant plan escape me,” he says. “I assume you mean to remove the Fire Lord from power and end the war. But without the current Fire Lord, the only way you’ll manage that is if a new Fire Lord issues blanket orders to cease hostilities. And since the Fire Nation’s generals are naturally inclined to attack…” He lifts an eyebrow, leaving a long, indulgent silence. “If you want your orders to be heeded, you need a Fire Lord from the line of Sozin. There’s no way around it.”

“Oh.” Aang visibly deflates.

“Who comes to mind, to replace the current Fire Lord?” Ozai says, sounding sincerely curious. 

Zuko can spot the exact moment when Aang stumbles on the obvious answer. So can Ozai, going by his chuckle.

He tilts his head, his crown glinting. “Do you know where the princess is?”

“Uh…”

“And if you find her, do you expect her to be compliant?” Ozai’s golden eyes go wide. “How do you imagine she’ll rule the country? Will she be kind? Just? _Stable?”_

Every deadpan sentence burns, bitterly sarcastic and calculated. With horror, Zuko realizes that the others might not _notice_ the calculation. Silently, he pleads with Aang to quit waiting _._

“He’s the Avatar!” Katara comes to the rescue. “He’s got insight and wisdom you can’t even imagine.”

“The Avatar, yes,” Ozai says thoughtfully. “The living embodiment of balance. I must admit...I am Fire Lord Ozai.”

Everyone suddenly snaps back into attack stances. Zuko rolls his eyes. Ozai only allows himself to close his eyes and inhale deeply.

“I am the Fire Lord, and I find your message of peace and balance...enlightening.”

Aang drops his guard again. “You do?”

“It’s been a challenging century for the Fire Nation,” he says, sounding calm and improbably resigned. “We have lost a great deal in this war. Our people have been scarred by the horror perpetrated by my forefathers. With your guidance, with the partnership of the Avatar...I would be willing to open negotiations for peace.”

He slumps a little, eyes downcast. Zuko wants to vomit at the bad acting.

He checks the clock.

“He’s...not lying,” Toph says. She’s weirdly certain about it.

But Toph couldn’t catch Azula lying, and Ozai’s got three times as much practice. Zuko waits, pressing down the seething frustration, begging Aang to claim his so-called destiny and make a _move._

“Would you call back your forces before the comet?” Aang says hesitantly.

“I don’t intend to remove our armies from the colonies, and certainly not so quickly,” Ozai replies. “However, given the circumstances, I can call off all plans for expansion immediately.”

Zuko grits his teeth. Just because he _can_ doesn’t mean he will.

Sokka lets his boomerang arm fall. “Would you pay reparations to the Water Tribes for damage done, both to humans and to spirits?”

“Reparations for the loss of human lives and property, certainly. What payment would you recommend for the spirits?”

“Uh, how about a nice moon temple?” Aang says.

“Yeah!” Sokka exclaims, “With a really gorgeous ten-foot-tall statue of the moon spirit! I can draw up the initial sketches...”

Zuko seethes and steals glances at his clock as Aang tries to hold _peace negotiations,_ like Ozai’s got a shred of honor, like he deserves even the slightest trust.

Zuko waits until there’s under a minute left, until Aang’s fallen under Ozai’s spell and completely forgotten about his shirshu darts. He silently unties the ribbons behind his head and lets the mask drop to the floor. Ozai glances his way and then stops mid-sentence.

His kindly facade shatters in an instant. He shoots to his feet with daggers in his hands and fury in his eyes, every inch the Fire Lord.

(With fury in his eyes, and a trace of fear.)

“Back for an Agni Kai?” he says, all the warmth sucked away.

“No,” Zuko replies, equally cold.

He’s done waiting.

Zuko clenches a fist. Bends a golden headpiece.

Watches quietly as Ozai tumbles headlong to the floor.

Then he stands silent for a moment, as if in respect, as the pool of blood blossoms from a skull speared by its own crown.

/

Okay.

Quick question.

_What the hell?_

Two seconds ago, the Fire Lord was definitely alive on his dais. Toph felt him. Felt his heartbeat jump a little when Aang barged in, but it settled almost immediately until Lee dropped something, and said something, and the Fire Lord’s pulse spiked ridiculously, and then there was a _thump._

(There’s definitely no heartbeat anymore.)

Toph can’t see, and she doesn’t know what’s going on, but from the sound of it it seems no one who can see knows what’s going on either. No one except Lee, who smashes his heel into the wall she raised. He kicks open a hole and springs through, and the rest of the rock falls, once the sun comes out and Ozai’s guards get their bending back and blow up the rest of it.

Toph’s frozen. They’re all frozen, shocked, waiting for the world to make sense again. Everyone but Lee, who unsheathes his twin _dao_ and proceeds to raise hell.

Toph flings up defenses against stray fire blasts, but she’s not even fighting. None of them are. It’s just Lee’s battle, and he dances between the fireballs and whirls amidst the guards like a tornado. She can’t hear his footfalls, but she can track him by the clanging of swords. By the bodies hitting the floor. By the heartbeats being extinguished, one after another.

“Lee,” Aang calls. “You need to calm down!”

One guard shrieks, one of their arms suddenly wrestling with _their other arm._ Though their right hand’s clinging tight to a sword, the weapon moves like it’s gained a mind of its own, flinging them around, stabbing their fellow guards and then-

Their pulse goes dark too.

Katara takes a step beside her, dropping into a bending pose and hurling a stream of water. Now _Lee_ drops, suddenly flaring back into Toph’s awareness. The ground rings when he hits it, like he’s weighed down by an awful lot of metal. He doesn’t move, presumably frozen by ice.

He twitches. Somehow, the twelfth guard drops like a stone, gasping for air as metal armor crunches, half a room away.

“Did you just…” 

Toph’s cut off by the _crack_ of ice breaking, and the sound of swords whooshing through the air. Lee hacks himself free and leaps right back up.

Toph looks to Katara, hoping she let him out on purpose. Going by the jump in her pulse, there’s no such luck.

“Please put the swords down,” Aang pleads in his most soothing manner.

Lee sticks the _dao_ back in his sheath. Somehow, standing amidst thirteen corpses, Toph isn’t comforted.

There’s a long, awkward silence.

“This,” Sokka finally says, “was not the plan.”

“If you have a chance to fight Ozai,” Lee spits back, “you’re a _fool_ not to take it.”

Aang protests, “But he was willing to try for peace! We could have worked with him-“

A burst of laughter explodes through the room, borderline hysterical. It’s uncomfortably similar to Ozai’s laugh, which had filtered through the bunker wall a couple hours ago.

“That was a lie,” Lee says once he claws back control. “That’s his specialty. Ozai _always_ lies-“

“But we had the darts,” Aang interrupts, voice twisted up like he’s about to cry. “He wasn’t supposed to die!”

“Sacrifices are necessary. There’s no way around it-“ Lee’s voice shakes too, but it sounds like anger- “for a real freedom fighter.”

“You sound like Jet,” Katara snaps.

That makes Lee hesitate. When he speaks, he seems unsure for the first time. “You knew Jet?”

Toph frowns. “Who’s Jet?”

“He’s a boy-“

“He’s an extremist who blew up a dam and washed out an entire town on a stupid vendetta,” Katara says, way too squeaky.

“He’s a boy who lost everything to the Fire Nation,” Lee fires back, voice now streaked through with pain. “But he fought, and he survived, and then he disappeared off the face of the planet. And now? He’s lost his mind. He’s lost his _memory,_ because the Fire Nation broke him, the same way the Fire Nation breaks everything!”

His monologue echoes through the hall.

“The disappearing act didn’t happen in Ba Sing Se, did it?” Toph asks tentatively. 

“...Yeah, why?”

Oh boy.

“I’m not saying that the Fire Nation doesn’t suck,” she ventures. “But if someone disappears and then turns up _weird_ in Ba Sing Se, that’s...probably the Dai Li’s fault.”

“The Dai Li?”

“Yeah,” she says. “You know, the secret police?”

“The…the Dai Li don’t do that,” Lee stammers. “They’re cultural protectors, they just regulate art classes and fight litter-“

“And brainwash anyone who doesn’t agree with them,” Toph finishes. “And I bet you anything Jet didn’t agree with them.”

“Hey. Lee.” Sokka hesitates. “Did you ever take a trip to Lake Laogai?”

He sounds _hopeful._ For a second, Toph is too.

“What’s Lake Laogai?” Lee replies immediately, genuinely confused.

Dammit.

“The guards,” Katara whispers, stepping forward with water sloshing around her hands. “Maybe I can heal the guards-“

Placing a hand on her arm, Toph stops her.

“They were loyal to Ozai,” Lee rumbles, low in his throat.

Roused from his reverie, Aang strides forward towards him. Twinkletoes is gone; his footsteps fall like boulders against the marble. 

“So are we killing everyone loyal to Ozai now?” he demands. “Is that the master plan?”

Before Lee answers, the main doors of the hall blow open, smashed by a fireball. Three new people rush in. After a second, Toph recognizes Mister Mushi and Master Piandao. The third person’s a stranger- an adult firebender, going by the stance they slide into.

Their hearts stutter as they take in the carnage.

When Lee speaks, it’s directly to his uncle. 

Or his “uncle.”

Toph’s not trusting anything at this point.

“You will pass control of the Fire Nation to the Avatar by naming him regent-“ Lee’s tone freezes over, once again lethally cold and calculating- “Fire Lord Iroh.”

Toph’s jaw drops.

“What,” he snaps, turning back towards her and Aang. “Ozai was right. You need someone else from the line of Sozin to take the crown, at least in name.”

“And Mister Mushi, I mean, Mister Iroh, are you...” Aang trails off.

When Iroh speaks, he sounds miles away. “It’s true. Ozai was my younger brother.”

Iroh’s a pretty common name in the Fire Nation, but all of the sudden a hundred boring history lessons that Toph systematically rooted out of her brain come flooding back. This is General Iroh. Elder son of Fire Lord Azulon, Dragon of the West. 

That Iroh.

The strange firebender speaks out, gruff and stern. “I had no love for Ozai, but you know as well as I that the Fire Lord cannot hand his country to the Avatar, any more than the Avatar can swear loyalty to the Fire Lord.”

Lee unsheathes his swords. The twin _dao_ whistle through the air as he points them straight at Iroh.

He says, “No offense to Master Jeong Jeong, but you might want to re-plan your answer.”

Toph braces for fire.

“You have quite the plan of your own,” Iroh says, not throwing fire (yet). “May I ask how it proceeds, if I refuse?”

“You’ll be handed to the Earth Kingdom navy,” Lee says, even more coolly. “And the Fire Sages will discover a will naming _me_ Fire Lord.”

Now Iroh’s voice simmers with anger. “You would usurp the throne by forgery?”

“It’s traditional,” comes the steely retort. “Worked great for Ozai.”

“And what will you do when Azula comes to assert her right-“

“She’ll propose an Agni Kai,” Lee smoothly finishes, “which I’ll win. She’ll have metal armbands on. It’ll be _easy.”_

Iroh, who has the best breath control Toph’s ever heard, is struggling to inhale. His breath comes in short choppy bursts, like he’s on the verge of-

“I don’t really...need control of the entire country?” Aang says from the side. “Fire Lord Iroh, do you promise to stop taking over the world?”

“Of course I do.”

“You can’t take his word for it,” Lee warns.

“But why not?” pleads Aang.

He scoffs. “He’s as likely to be lying as Ozai was. That’s how the entire line of Sozin works. They lie, and they hide things, and they always play the long game and make you think they’re something they’re not, and if you take your eyes off them for two seconds they set everything on fire!”

“I am not the same man I was,” Iroh insists. Toph doesn’t doubt his honesty for a second, but Lee only turns up the volume, words amplified spectacularly by the rock around him. Toph didn’t know one teenager could be that loud.

“Why should any of us trust _you?”_ he cries. “Why? You wrought terror on Ba Sing Se for six hundred days-“

“If I still stood against the Earth Kingdom,” Iroh roars over him, “why would I spend three years wandering the world, doing my best to guide and protect one of the most precocious earthbenders I know?”

His words resound through the hall, and Toph gawps in shock. 

Lee? 

Precocious? 

Did she miss something?

Lee sounds more shaken than her, barely breathing, _“What?”_

Iroh speaks again, quieter but unyielding. “You are many things, nephew, but you are not subtle. You have traveled the Earth Kingdom and now the Fire Nation in your tap dancing shoes, bending the sound away with every step.”

“Your uncle and I had a spirited discussion about your metalbending,” Master Piandao adds, “oh...about seven years back.”

_(What.)_

“You know me,” Iroh says, taking a careful step forward like he’s approaching a wounded animal. “I will not give up responsibility as Fire Lord, but I know peace and balance are best for every country in this world, including our own. You know my heart, Prince Zuko-“

“Don’t call me that,” he mutters, sharp as a _shuriken._

“But you have always been a prince of this land.”

“This isn’t my land-“

“It is,” he insists, voice impossibly gentle as he takes another step, “and your father could not take that from you.”

“He’s not my father-“

“Are you speaking in poetry?” Iroh asks, plaintive. “I suppose I can understand if you must reject your legacy-“

“You’re supposed to be the _wise one,”_ Lee- Zuko- explodes, half-laughing and half-screaming. “None of it was ever mine! I’m an earthbender so clearly-“ with a rough _whoosh,_ he swings one sword around to gesture at Ozai’s corpse- _“that_ isn’t my father! My earthbending comes from my real father-“

“Your earthbending comes from your great-grandfather-“

“Right,” Zuko erupts with a delirious giggle. “Right, because Sozin’s so well-known for his earthbending!”

“Not Sozin,” Iroh cries, utterly anguished. “I mean your mother’s grandfather, _Avatar Roku.”_

Zuko starts to say something, but it comes out a croak as he cuts himself off, going eerily silent.

Then everyone else jumps and _freaks out,_ and Iroh flinches and then spins around, like he’s watching Zuko run straight past him. He’s sprinting in a straight line, and Toph tries to guess where but the ground feels wobbly under her feet, and it seems like-

“Did he just run into a metal column?” she asks.

The ground gets extra wobbly now. Toph chalks it up to her own shock.

“He just ran into a metal column,” Sokka reports, slow and low and stunned. “It let him in like he was walking through a curtain. Just rippled around him.”

“Do we know where he is now?”

“No, he-“

The ground shifts underfoot, the whole hall groaning under the force of a mighty earthquake. On instinct Toph drops into her steadiest stance to ride it out, like she’s on a boat about to capsize, and lifts her hands in case the ceiling decides to crash down.

It doesn’t. At last, the rumble subsides, and her friends slowly peel themselves up off the floor.

“I’m a little concerned,” Aang finally mumbles, “about my great-grandson.”

Iroh lets out a massive sigh.


	11. Chapter 11

Zuko doesn’t notice the first earthquake. Or at the least, scrambling up through the inside of a metal beam, propelled by bending and sheer wild instinct, he doesn’t recognize it as a major geological event outside himself. The floor shifts, and he nearly falls over and over, tangled by his own limbs, and it all makes perfect sense as his whole world breaks apart.

Zuko’s not a _person,_ he is nothing but walls and secrets, and his walls are crumbling to dust. 

He tries to reflect on what just happened, but the scene comes to him in shards. His blades are clean. His blades are always clean. There’s spatter darkening the red of his clothes, but he can ignore that if he’s not looking, and there’s red all over his hands (the color of the Fire Nation, burned into his skin) but that’s what water’s for. He can ignore all that, but he can’t shake the image branded like lightning on his eyelids. The black hair and the ruined top-knot and the perfect, pristine pool of blood, pouring steadily from a hole in Ozai’s-

The Fire Lord’s-

Zuko never _set out_ to do it. He didn’t, it was only the back-up plan in case kidnapping-by-shirshu-dart failed, but he didn’t try to avoid it either. When the need presented itself he didn’t hesitate, so now there’s a hole in what might just be _his father’s head._

With a deafening moan, the ground throws Zuko to his knees.

He stays down. Gasps for breath. Catalogues the damage.

He’s an earthbender. He ought to be Earth Kingdom through and through, but that birthright’s been ripped away, ripped away because he never had it. It was all a child’s daydream, an amazing lie he spun himself, because he still hasn’t learned better than to _hope._

He’s an earthbender, and he’s spent years carefully building up the wall to shield that fact from discovery, and all that theater turned out useless. Uncle’s known the whole time. Uncle’s known the whole time, and he’s kept his silence, and that’s a feat of sneaky psychological sleight of hand that Zuko can’t possibly understand.

(Unless Uncle’s not being sneaky at all, and Zuko’s misjudged him all this time, and he actually _is_ just a kindly tea-drinking uncle who wants the best for him and the world. Zuko doesn’t know what to do with that.)

The ground stops shoving him around. With difficulty, Zuko peels himself up off the rock and keeps pressing forward, though he doesn’t know where he’s going yet. He speeds up to a run, and swings his swords, and hacks open a path to one of the volcano’s natural tunnels. It’s difficult work, and it feels _wrong_ to disrespect the mountain like this. But Zuko has no choice but to run, because he just crossed the Avatar and the last Fire Lord and the current Fire Lord, plus three extra master benders, plus the best of the Imperial Firebenders. He has to run, because there’s never been a place for him here in this country, in Caldera-

He barrels into a cavern with a floor of lava.

Without waiting to think about it, he jumps into the volcano.

There’s an instant where he regrets it, but the lava freezes right before his feet make contact. It freezes to boiling-hot rock that’s already sinking, but that’s something he can work with. He sprints forward, the rock path forming with each step and disappearing behind him, and he hauls himself up the sheer cliff on the other side. He bursts right into another cavern rocked by intermittent explosions of magma, bursting up randomly through blowholes in the floor.

Zuko glances back. The ground’s still rumbling. It could be his imagination, or maybe the search parties are already on his tail.

So he charges through the room, begging the magma not to burn the other half of his face off, and it pauses the explosions until he makes it out to solid ground (not solid, heaving like his lungs, up and down and alive under his shoes). As lava shoots up in his wake, he keeps running.

They all know who he is now. 

There’s no place left for him here. Not with the Avatar (the horror on Aang’s face mirrored _Mother’s,_ whenever a shouting match would end in fire flung around the room). Not with Uncle (stricken by horror and disappointment, and Zuko can’t tell which hurts more). Not in the Fire Nation.

The ground keeps shifting under his feet, and Zuko can’t _think._

He’s tried to keep his secrets, but apparently he’s been terrible at it. Here’s one secret that’s surely out now- three years back his veins flooded with fire, the second his so-called father burnt off his face. He’s spent three years living with fury he can bend but never quench. He’s bottled it up for so long, but it’s stayed, hidden, coiled at his core. 

(The way he feels right now, if he drilled a hole in his skull, it’d gush red-hot magma.)

For three years he’s lied and sealed his anger under a mask of stone- plain, calm and cold. Not dangerous. Not _scarred._ He’s tried for so long, he’s bent himself and remade himself to seem good and quiet and smart and acceptable. For three years, Uncle’s reached out to him more times than he can count, has tried to give him space to talk, and Zuko’s never once allowed himself to take it. It’s a rule he learned early: there’s no trusting the line of Sozin.

Well- he reviews his own actions with a broken shriek of a laugh- that’s one rule not broken today.

Three years back, Zuko shattered and began rebuilding. He rebuilt himself from rubble, on hatred for the Fire Nation, with a mask of calm that hid blazing rage. But there’s a third ring at his very core, buried so deep he let himself forget. He doesn’t want to be Fire Nation. He doesn’t want to be Sozin’s great-grandson. He doesn’t want any part of it, because he hates the war and the lies and the blood on his hands.

He doesn’t want it, because he is weak and flameless and easy to burn.

(Under the rage, there’s a churning ocean of sorrow and shame.)

If he’s a Fire Nation prince, born from the line of Sozin, then he must be judged by the Fire Nation's rules, which have branded him irrevocably as an abject failure.

If.

He busts out the side of the volcano to where the sun’s back to shining. In the light, curiosity breaks him at last. He flattens one sword and changes the texture so it functions as a passable mirror.

He doesn’t scream when he holds the mirror up to his own face. When he yanks his hair out of its braid and gathers it in his other fist, in a haphazard mimicry of a top-knot. When he perceives the truth that’s been written on his face, certainly through adolescence. Perhaps through his whole life.

If you shave off the baby fat, if you add a couple decades of wrinkles and weariness and you wash away the scar, Zuko looks like Ozai.

(Uncle tried to tell him. Uncle tried, and Zuko stayed burrowed under his defenses and denial and didn’t listen, why didn’t he just _listen-)_

He looks up, and there’s an ocean. A blue expanse surrounds the island, dotted with Earth Kingdom ships. There’s a whole world where he could run and be something, anything other than Prince Zuko. He could leave the Fire Nation to Uncle and Aang and fate. He could slip onto a ship and hide. He could change his name a third time and slip back into the Earth Kingdom and run so far they’ll never find him.

 _I can understand,_ Uncle had said, broken-hearted, _if you must reject your legacy._

Zuko could reject his legacy.

He turns slowly and lifts his chin to consider the caldera waiting above him. The island that feels nothing like the Earth Kingdom did- solid ground, yes, but alive and awake and _calling._ He considers the turtleducks in the pond at the caldera’s very center. Azula might not have murdered them yet, if only because she found targets more worthy of her focus.

He’s never managed to cut this land out of his heart entirely.

Zuko sighs, and the ground seems to exhale with him.

He takes one last glance at the ocean and then starts the climb.

/

Zuko stumbles on the trek uphill. He intends to face himself head-on, but he keeps misstepping, falling flat and picking himself up again. It gets worse when he makes it to the flat ground of the city. His vision blurs, golden eyes flooding with tears that soon overflow, streaking hot down his face. There’s wailing in the streets. Caldera’s guards strive to calm the panic over the eclipse and the naval battles and the earthquake- earthquakes?- and so no one notices Zuko, weaving through.

He creeps to a side entrance of the palace, still right where he remembers. One tap, and the three secure metal locks fall open. Zuko presses his forehead to the cool metal for a moment, because he’s burning up and burnt out and swaying on his feet, but he pushes onwards.

Heat stabs through him, and he stops halfway down a hallway, falling too hard against a wall. When he gets back up, his arm’s left an indentation, stamped into the metal.

(He’s left his mark all over this place, hasn’t he?)

Zuko’s heart starts fluttering, and the edges of his vision go black like he’s inhaled a lungful of smoke. He closes his eyes and moves forward by feel alone, feeling his way to the heart of the palace, to dust and white sheets and empty rooms that are blessedly cool.

Maybe it’s stress. Maybe it’s memories. Either way, the heat presses Zuko to his knees.

He seals the door and walls himself in.

After three years, he lets himself fall.

/

Toph’s got two hands, two feet and one ear pressed to the rock of the volcano, trying to work out where Zuko went. Katara, Sokka and Aang already set out through the main door of the bunker to search the shore. Master Piandao and Master Jeong Jeong have begun combing the bunker itself. Mister Mushi- General Iroh, who’s also casually the Fire Lord now- accompanies Toph as she checks out a mysterious hole blasted in the bunker wall.

“This feels more like earthbending than firebending,” she says, running her hands over the damage. “But I’m not sure.”

“Let us try it.”

Toph steps through into a hastily carved tunnel. It’s not natural, but it’s not classic earthbending either; there are violent gashes all over the place, bleeding edges that might cut her if she touched them.

She charges forward with the Fire Lord right behind her and finds that this path merges with one of the volcano’s naturally formed tunnels, and they run forward into-

A cave with a lava floor.

That’s friendly.

“Okay,” she says, crossing her arms. “Is your nephew also a secret airbender?”

“I...don’t think so.”

Iroh’s not as confident as she wants him to be, but she takes his word for it. “In that case, he wouldn’t try to cross this.”

Toph punches a hole in the tunnel wall, earthbending a new path straight up and out to the side of the volcano. Iroh scrabbles up behind her.

“I don’t feel him,” she says, pressing a hand into the volcano’s rich soil. “But I usually can’t.”

“Do you sense any further violence?”

Toph groans. “Not yet. Is he going to stab _more_ people?”

“I truly hope not,” Iroh says, sounding a decade older than he did yesterday.

“We should check the beach too, ‘cause he’ll try to leave the island.”

Iroh contemplates the matter for a moment before looking towards the caldera above them. “Perhaps it is arrogance to think I know him at all...but my nephew might stay.”

Toph shrugs. Then she yanks out a chunk of volcano (sorry, not sorry, Fire Nation) and turns it into their own personal elevator, rapidly lifting them to the peak. She follows Iroh as he marches straight to the center of the city, through crowds that stop for them and stare and whisper. They charge through the main court of the palace and into the building itself. It’s mostly metal- which makes sense, when half your major enemies are earthbenders- and Toph kneels on the threshold and splays her fingers on the floor.

“There’s a ton of people running around, maybe because of the earthquake. But…” She frowns and presses down harder. “There’s also someone alone, in a room close by. They might be Lee’s size.”

“Which way?”

“Down the hall, to the right, up the second staircase and-”

“Ursa,” Iroh breathes, sounding like he’s seen a ghost. Then he takes off like he knows exactly where to go. Toph follows him, down the hall to the right and up the stairs, down a corridor that smells weirdly stale for a palace, like it doesn’t get visited a lot.

“He has welded the door shut-“

Toph moves in front of him and tears a new opening, the metal creaking loud in complaint. She prepares for Zuko to throw a sword at her or magically strangle her from across the room or-

Curl up on the floor, heartbeat rapid and fragile, totally unconscious.

Creeping forward, she places a hand on his forehead. “He has a really bad fever.”

“Of course he does,” Iroh says a moment later, voice torn-up with anguish and...pride?

“Is he going to be okay?”

“I have to hope he will be.”

/

Iroh has a government to control, a war to end, and a city to rebuild after the day’s string of earthquakes. He has a dead brother to explain. He has a princess to find.

He does it all from the outer rooms of the palace hospital, because his nephew is burning up and shivering the whole time.

The first time Zuko wakes, his eyes spark with panic. At first Iroh thinks he’s delirious, not really seeing anything at all. Then Zuko’s hands fly up and dig into his face, and Iroh recalls the last time they were in the palace hospital together.

“No, you are safe from him now,” he says, taking his nephew’s hands as gently as he can.

Katara’s taken up residence by Zuko too, applying the most sophisticated healing techniques that waterbending has to offer. She frowns a moment before realizing the implications, her eyes going wide with an unspoken question.

Iroh nods to her as Zuko slips back under.

/

Iroh has three years to relearn. He must tug on every loose strand, must study every bitter, muttered remark. He must remember every flash of half-hidden fear and ask himself if that fear was for _him._

There had been a fever in Zuko’s eyes when he stood in that bunker. A sickness of a different sort, but a fever nonetheless, as he aimed his swords towards Iroh with only the slightest tremor in his hands. Iroh wonders how long Zuko had been ill, burning up with anger and pain hidden under a fragile shield of stone. 

He’s openly flushed with fever now, his breathing shallow, his eyes glassy and vague. He wakes rarely, and when he does the nurses immediately fetch Iroh. He drops whatever documents he’s considering- say, a record of a hostage situation that makes him rage at his brother anew- and rushes inside to his nephew’s bed.

“Uncle?” 

His eyes are glazed over and his voice is fragile, but he says it clearly. Iroh presses back the need to cry.

“Nephew,” he answers. “You have been ill-”

“I shouldn’t be here.” 

“You are in the hospital, where a sick person ought to be-”

“No,” Zuko insists, eyes unfocused but tone stubborn as rock, “no, I wasn’t supposed to come back, I’m not supposed to be in the Fire Nation. Uncle, I’m not supposed to...be.”

He falls asleep, and Iroh stares back with glassy eyes of his own, hoping that wasn’t the intended end of his sentence.

He smoothes Zuko’s dark hair, long enough for a top-knot he may never wear. “Of course you’re supposed to be here.”

/

But the fever climbs, and Iroh begins to doubt.

He has to push Katara to bed at the end of the second day. “You have done all you can so far.”

“But he’s not infected,” she says through gritted teeth. “I don’t know _why-”_

“It can’t be a natural sickness,” the head doctor gravely interjects. “There’s a rare crisis of the psyche that runs in Sozin’s line, afflicting the benders strongest in spirit. I’d thought that meant only firebenders, but I’m afraid I was wrong.” 

Seeing Katara’s confusion, Iroh elaborates: “My nephew shattered his own understanding of himself. Now he is at war with himself, in his mind...and his body.”

“Because. Because of his father?”

Katara catches herself before saying exactly what Zuko did to his father. They’ve decided it’s safest to lay that blame elsewhere. Zuko needs no further threats on his life.

“That is possible,” Iroh sighs. “But I suspect it was his choice to stay and face his legacy as prince of the Fire Nation, where it would have been easier to run.”

Katara lays a frozen towel across Zuko’s brow, and the ice immediately begins to melt.

“Firebenders can survive all but the most extreme fevers,” he adds, running a gentle hand through Zuko’s hair. “But I have worried often about how an earthbender might be affected.”

After a minute, Katara replaces the towel with a fresh cold compress and consults briefly with the palace doctors. Then she retires for the night. Iroh stays.

/

The fever climbs. Zuko’s sleep turns restless, and the hospital walls moan, and he thrashes about and kicks off the blankets that he’d clung to before. When he wakes, he’s incoherent, unseeing except to flinch from light. He mumbles incoherently about villages and dams and dancing shoes. Iroh tries to listen and to talk to him, soft and steady, but he can’t guess whether he’s getting through to his nephew. If he’s honest, that’s something he’s never been able to guess.

The Fire Sages come, summoned from Avatar Roku’s temple to give their insight. 

“Agni has granted him an inner fire to rival any firebender’s,” the head sage concludes after an examination. “Though his talents have manifested differently, he has the intuition and power to command both earth and certain arcane forms of flame-”

“Forget the power.” Iroh interrupts the sage, breaking five different forms of social protocol and not caring in the slightest. “Will he live?”

After hesitating, the head sage bows his head. “His inner flame burns brilliant, and he is vulnerable to it. Especially now.”

“Because of his tender age?”

“And because of the approach of Sozin’s Comet. It will fan the inner flame of everyone who can feel it. Prince Zuko...” The sage pauses, because Zuko is still in name not a prince, but Iroh does not correct him. “Prince Zuko will have to fight this battle alone. He must hold strong within himself, or he will be consumed.” 

/

The fever climbs, and Iroh wonders if this is the universe’s idea of balance. If, after losing Lu Ten to earth, he will lose Zuko to fire. Despite the dragons and despite the secrets of the sun and flames like rainbows, Iroh breaks for a moment.

He wonders if fire truly can do anything but kill.

He has long since shut down all plans of invasion. He means to spend the night of the comet far from any battlefield but Zuko’s bedside, for even if his nephew must fight this like an island alone Iroh will not leave him. Against his will, he is hauled away by his ministers. There’s news, they tell him, of fire in Ba Sing Se, of holes blown wide in the city walls and a lake set alight. There are reports- astronomically impossible, they swear- of a second comet, a dancing flicker of bright blue streaking across the Earth Kingdom, its path entwined with the red of Sozin’s Comet.

Katara’s shriek startles Iroh from his contemplation, drawing him inside the hospital once more. He runs to Zuko’s side and finds his nephew quaking, limbs jerking, body wracked by a seizure. At once Katara pours out a vial of spirit-touched water and tries to heal him, the droplets glimmering on her hands, and Iroh hopes, for even in his delirium Zuko pushes through with his iron will, struggling through one breath and then another-

Until he doesn’t.

For a moment, it seems truly impossible, to live as both a prince of this nation and an earthbender.

Then Iroh springs forward, inner flame surging with both power and discipline granted by Sozin’s Comet, with the conviction that his nephew will not die alone, and calls lightning to his own hands.

/

_Zuko stands on flat ground, the world blurring around him. No matter how he squints, he sees only a dreamscape of dark clouds, whirling around him until-_

_Lightning. He flinches, momentarily blinded._

_The clouds part, and a blue dragon slips out._

_“You need to run, Zuko,” it whispers in a dark, brazen voice that sounds so like his father’s. “It’ll never be safe for you here.”_

_“Don’t listen to that, Prince Zuko!” A red dragon slithers forth, its sinuous coils looping around him. The voice is bright and bouncy and familiar. “You have to stay and help. Just keep breathing; there’s still so much work to do.”_

_“But aren’t you tired?” Zuko’s head swivels back to the blue dragon, the shimmer of its scales mesmerizing. “Just let go. It’ll be easier. Why cling to this one little island when a whole new world’s waiting for you? Just let it all...”_

_Zuko’s bone-weary. He sways, nearly letting himself fall-_

“Burn.”

_The blue dragon disappears with that last word, and then the red dragon’s gone too. With a thunderous groan the ground shatters, revealing a maelstrom of glowing red fire, but Zuko holds on to a shard of rock, refusing to let go. Refusing to burn._

_He looks up and reaches out one hand to catch a bolt of lightning, flung down to him like a rope. Like a ray of hope._

/

Iroh presses the cold fire against Zuko’s heart, willing the spark of life back into him. He applies it in a steady rhythm, praying to Agni between each beat, praying for Zuko’s stubbornness to sustain him a little longer.

With a shuddering gasp, Zuko breathes.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Comfort and communication, royal family-style.

The fever breaks.

When Zuko wakes up, he feels cool and quiet. Tired. But not- for a change- fragile.

“Water,” he says with a voice full of gravel. 

Someone passes him a cup of water, and he drinks it and feels mostly human again.

“So-“ that someone plops down unceremoniously on the left side of his bed- “hello there, Mr. Precocious Earthbender.”

He turns his head and squints, and slowly Toph comes into focus.

“Um. If it helps, I genuinely was a terrible student. I wasn’t failing your lessons on purpose.”

“That doesn’t help, actually!” She crosses her arms and pouts at him. “You invented metalbending. That makes sense because you were had no clue what you were doing and you were _here.”_ She waves one hand vaguely at the palace around them, chock-full of metal. “On the other hand, it’s completely unfair!”

“...sorry?”

“So here’s how you’re going to make it up to me,” Toph charges on. “It’s embarrassing that the guy who beat me to metalbending can’t bend  _ mud, _ so you’re going to keep taking lessons with me for the rest of your foreseeable life.”

“You’d let me do that?” Zuko says, soft with hope.

“You’re also going to teach me how to metalbend like you do,” she sniffs, “as payment for your other crimes.”

Hearing that, he frowns. “What other crimes?”

“I’m the only other metalbender in the world.” Her face scowls in outrage, but she sounds like she’s suppressing laughter. “So who do you think the doctors called in to take off the extra sword that you bent down your pa-”

“Metalbending lessons,” he interrupts. “Daily. For the rest of our lives.”

Toph throws him a wicked grin. “It’s a deal, Master Zuko.”

/

“Prince” still doesn’t quite fit. “Crown Prince” definitely doesn’t. But  _ Master _ Zuko? 

Zuko exhales and lets himself sink a little further into his hospital bed, resting a little more easily. 

/

He rises at sunrise, roused by both the light and the scent of jasmine tea. Delicate and calming, it wafts from his right side.

Black hair tumbling in his face, he shifts to sit up and look Uncle in the eye, only briefly glancing at the gold crown now nestled in his hair.

Five prongs.

Uncle sets aside a scroll- Zuko spies the Earth Kingdom’s seal, stamped in the corner- to smile at him. “May I offer you some tea?”

“Yes, please.”

As the tea trickles into his cup, they both wait in familiar silence.

“I have to admit,” Zuko finally says, “all the times I imagined you hitting me with lightning, I never thought of this.”

Teacup halfway to his lips, Uncle goes very, very still.

“I am sorry,” he answers after one long sip of jasmine. “I cannot imagine the fear that must come with being an earthbender in your position, but I should have tried.”

“If you knew…” Zuko breaks off with an angry, strangled sound.

“I did not know at first. Piandao and I had our speculation, but metalbending was as surprising to me as it must have been to you. At first, I dismissed the signs as coincidence, and it took me too long to accept them as a sort of earthbending.”

Zuko snorts in sympathy.

“By then,” Uncle says, not  _ careful _ yet full of care, “you had built yourself a new life, far from the Fire Nation and your father’s overbearing presence. If you wanted to keep your secrets to yourself, I had no wish to take them from you. I was willing to wait until you told me of your own free will.”

“What if I never did?”

“I thought you had found balance,” he murmurs. “Who was I to take it from you?”

After setting his tea aside, Zuko buries his face in his hands.

“Sometimes I worried, yes, but...Nephew, I hoped you were happy.”

“I tried to be,” he sighs into his palms, his voice tiny and hard. “I tried so hard.”

Uncle runs out of words and leans forward instead, laying a warm hand on Zuko’s back. Not a full embrace, like he’s still too afraid of smothering or breaking him, but that touch melts half the tension from Zuko’s body.

“Please hear me out. I believe you are my nephew,” he says, soft but certain, “by blood. Even if by some twist of fate that is untrue, you will remain so in my heart. The prince’s crown is yours, if you want it. And perhaps you prefer the Earth Kingdom now, but the Fire Nation is also your land, and has always been, no matter how my brother tried to deny it.”

Zuko doesn’t quite believe it, but as he glances up around the palace a ghostly voice whispers,  _ never deny who you are. _

“You might be right,” he mumbles. “The mountain feels like it’s mine, even if nothing on top of it does.”

“I am glad.” Uncle brushes Zuko’s hair back, revealing his face. When he speaks, he’s impossibly gentle. “It's time for you to look inward and begin asking yourself the big questions. Who are you, and what do you want?”

/

The doctors push Zuko to spend time in the sunlight, to restore his “inner flame.” He gets the sense they don’t know what to do with him, because that’s usually a treatment reserved for firebenders. Still he won’t protest, not when Uncle suggests that he sunbathe by the turtleduck pond.

He lies on a blanket, face down against the fresh-smelling soil, sun warm on his back. He’s not sure which of them’s responsible, but he can feel his heart settling.

“So you’re why I’m not allowed in my own garden.”

Zuko rolls over and cracks his one good eye open to see his little sister looming over him. Azula’s standing normally, not in a fighting stance, with her crown tucked in her top-knot.

(After a second he notices that’s a really small top-knot, and her bangs are uneven. There are bandages around her hands.)

“Are you planning to kill me?” he asks.

“Not in the next hour, no.”

“What a relief.”

The doctors have kept him well away from major news, citing his current physical and psychological vulnerability, but Aang and his friends aren’t as subtle as they think they are. Zuko heard them whispering about Azula when they mistook him for asleep.

“Is it true,” he asks warily, “during the comet, you broke out of Earth Kingdom custody, bust through the walls, and then jet-propelled yourself from Ba Sing Se to the colonies?”

“It was better than that,” she sniffs, “but yes.”

Here he’d thought he was the dramatic one.

Azula counters: “Is it true, during the eclipse, you broke the Avatar into the bunker, slaughtered Father and his guards and then proceeded to cause an earthquake?”

He frowns. “I’m not sure about the earthquake part.”

“But you did kill Father,” she says, so curiously that Zuko realizes he’s been played.

“...You didn’t know.”

“Not until you told me.”

Zuko narrows his good eye. He doesn’t want to fight, not here, in the one place left pure in his memories, but he always does what he has to.

“Uncle told me Aang turned into Avatar Roku, who personally smited Father with an inferno,” she replies with a smirk. “Which is about the neatest political spin I’ve ever seen. But.” She shifts, blocking the sun from Zuko’s field of view. “How did it really happen?”

There’s metal all around- in her outfit, and in the courtyard. Zuko’s reflexes are faster than hers, if he needs them to be.

“Crown to the head,” he says. “Instant death.”

Anything’s a weapon if you’re desperate enough.

“How unfortunate.” She cocks her head and purses her lips in disappointment. “I would have made it last.”

“...Sorry, what?”

“I could’ve stayed in Ba Sing Se and burnt it down,” she says, perfectly casual, now inspecting her nails. “I wanted to, it would’ve been as simple as lighting a candle. But I decided I’d rather get back to Caldera, and it’s  _ not  _ because I was homesick.”

She pauses, like an actress waiting for the audience to react before she’ll deign to finish her monologue. Zuko decides to indulge her. “Then why?”

“Because I hadn’t heard you’d already killed our dear father,” she answers sweetly, “so I thought I’d have to do it myself. If you want something done right, after all…”

“But you were always his favorite,” he comments, trying to keep resentment out of his tone. “What changed?”

“Well, you left me to the Dai Li.”

Zuko winces.“Did you take a trip to Lake Laogai?”

She tosses her head back with a scoff. “Everyone keeps asking me that. Yes, I visited Lake Laogai. No, they didn’t brainwash me. They needed me intact, after all, for their interrogations.”

“Interrogations?”

“It’s not like I said anything useful,” Azula snaps, in her pinched, flippant tone. “I was perfectly fine until they put me in a hospital, as some sort of...humanitarian gesture. Really, it was a  _ stupid _ gesture that made it even easier to break out once the comet came.” 

Zuko knows he shouldn’t press his luck. This is unfamiliar ground- he’s not sure they’ve ever had a conversation this long before, and he’s afraid to shatter their fragile line of communication. But he’s tired of silence.

“But,” he says, “I was the reason you fell to the Dai Li. Not him.”

She nods. “It was your metalbending, yes.”

“My inspirational speech helped!”

“You mean, ‘your idealistic whining didn’t hurt.’”

Zuko snorts. They both fall quiet as a turtleduckling breaks off from the flock and swims over to them.

“It was my fault,” he says quietly, reaching out to stroke its fluffy head. “Why not target me for your revenge?”

Surprisingly nonchalant, she shrugs. “You faced me with honor, and I struck first. It was my own fault I lost.”

Zuko frowns. He’s never found the ethics of battle quite so clear-cut.

“But then the Dai Li opened negotiations,” she adds, her golden-eyed stare drifting up towards the sky. “They asked for a hundred thousand gold coins. Father countered...with a threat to disown me for getting captured. I’d be worth less that way.”

Or maybe she said “worthless.”

“Pathetic.” Still petting the bird, he watches her reflection and sees her scowl before he clarifies, “I mean him. He needed some new tricks in his parenting repertoire. He was repeating himself.”

Azula emits an unnatural squawk that he recognizes, a second late, as a chuckle. “So no,” she finishes with a glow in her eyes. “I’m not a brainwashed agent of the Earth Kingdom. I’m furious, and that fury is all  _ mine.” _

Zuko drops his scarred cheek right into the soil, abruptly overwhelmed by fury of his own. He’s drunk his tea, and he’s meditated, and it still hasn’t faded.

“If it helps,” he mutters, “I get it.”

They both go silent. Out of the corner of his eye he catches her fidgeting, struggling to hook a too-short curl of hair behind her ear.

“You broke Mai’s heart,” she declares abruptly.

He glares. “How’d I do that?”

“You broke all her weapons. She’s going to kill you for that.”

“With what?”

He waits.

Suddenly, a sound as bright and grating as lightning crackles through the air. He twitches before realizing that she’s really, whole-heartedly laughing.

Cracking a smile of his own, Zuko pats the grass beside him. “Stay for a minute. I’ll talk you out of burning down Ba Sing Se if you talk me out of razing Caldera.”

She looks up. Zuko follows her gaze to see Katara and Aang holding hands under the colonnade, both frozen and watching them in blatant horror.

Azula quirks her lips and takes a seat. “You have a deal.”

/

Zuko sits down for a game of _pai sho_ that night, along with the obligatory cup of tea. Uncle swears that it’s just _pai sho,_ no secret mind games or double meanings thrown in. Just an uncle and his nephew.

(No white lotus tiles either. Zuko wants at least a little hope of winning.)

Uncle seems content to play in silence, with only the occasional, straightforward strategy hint, but Zuko speaks up.

“I’ve been thinking about what you asked, Uncle. About who I am and what I want. And I’ve accepted-“ he breathes deeply, in, out- “that I am a Fire Nation earthbender. But I don’t know  _ how _ to be both those things. I‘m still angry all the time. I don’t want to be, but I am.”

Uncle lets out a long sigh. 

“The line of Sozin,” he murmurs, “has inflicted pain across the world. The peace negotiations begin soon, but I know- it will take more than one lifetime to heal these wounds. I hope, nephew, that in time you can learn to let go of your anger.“

Zuko brushes his fingers across his scar. “I don’t think that’s happening.”

Uncle’s jaw tightens with sorrow of his own. “Then I hope you find a way to face your pain, and live with it, without being consumed.”

He nods tightly.

“And if I may…” Rising, Uncle fetches a scroll from his desk. “I did not want to sabotage your focus during our game, but I did find something that may be of use to you. No one has ever been in your unique position, but you are not the first great earthbender of our nation.” He presses a scroll- the last testament of Fire Lord Sozin- into Zuko’s hands. “There is pain in this story, but I hope you find light too, in your other great-grandfather’s footsteps.”

Zuko accepts it.


	13. Chapter 13

Zuko reads. He memorizes a tale of a red dragon and a blue dragon and an island split apart, and he lets the words settle into his lungs, and he tries to envision himself at peace.

(He can’t manage it. He doesn’t know how.)

But starting the next day, Toph teaches him more about earthbending (“you have to be _louder,_ Dusty, really catapult that rock”). He teaches Toph more about metalbending (“try to be _quiet,_ that’s how you know you _know_ the metal”). At night, he plays _pai sho_ and drinks tea and tries talking with his sister, to the alarm of everyone around. Apparently no one else finds murder jokes quite so funny.

Azula’s impressed with him, in her roundabout way, now that he’s a bender and finally worth her time. That’s how he discovers that she expresses admiration- envy?- with insults. Zuko learns this in the heat of battle, while fielding a constant barrage of jabs.

“The Dai Li put me in the hospital because I got a fever,” she announces abruptly one night. “Not nearly as bad as yours, because I’m not a weakling.”

Zuko doesn’t rise to the bait. Doesn’t even pay it any attention.

They’ll figure this out eventually.

After waiting for a counterattack that never comes, she adds, “It happened right after I decided to kill him.”

“Sure.”

“And I had the weirdest dreams.”

Zuko glances up from the hole he’s dug on instinct, plunging his hands in the palace garden’s dirt.

“Do you think it’s better to be trusted,” she says in a monotone, “or feared?”

“Trusted,” he replies automatically. Before she can sneer, he says, “And it’s not because Uncle brainwashed me.”

“Oh?”

“I feared our father, didn’t I? As much as anyone. I was angry, sure, but mostly because he scared me. Maybe it’s the same with you.”

She narrows her eyes and refuses to confirm it. “What’s your point?”

“If I’d actually trusted him? If I believed him for a second when he said he could love me and ‘restore my honor’ if I just brought him the Avatar?” Zuko shrugs. “Bet you he’d be alive right now.”

/

Zuko knew he turned the world upside-down during the eclipse, but nothing prepares him for the day King Kuei of the Earth Kingdom comes to Caldera.

He arrives in the palace, flanked by his generals and an army’s worth of loyal bureaucrats and a pet bear, all prepared to negotiate peace. Azula’s invited to the talks by default, as Fire Nation princess and heir to the throne. Aang‘s invited because he’s the Avatar, and he brings Katara, Sokka and Toph as his guests.

Zuko isn’t a prince, not yet, because he’s thought about Uncle’s offer long and hard and still hasn’t accepted. Uncle invites him regardless, with express permission to speak up if he feels the need. 

He arrives with a top-knot but no gold hairpiece to mark him, in a red silk tunic so dark it borders on brown. For one strange moment when he steps over the threshold, the entire room turns to look.

(Except Toph, who’s hunched over, pointedly looking away from everyone else, inscribing what’s hopefully a rude message onto one of the gilded columns.) 

Uncle doesn’t use the dais, and there are no open flames in the throne room. He sits opposite Kuei at the main table, with Azula at his right hand.

(Azula wears gloves on both hands, to hide spidery burns that still haven’t faded completely.)

“Nephew?” Uncle’s saved him a place on his left. “You may sit here if you choose.”

As Zuko looks at the innocent, empty spot, he’s stabbed by uncertainty.

Uncle must catch it, because his face softens. “But I understand if you would prefer to sit elsewhere.” He gestures at chairs set up further away, since not everyone can fit around the central table. “After all, several of our esteemed traveling companions are in these seats as well, and it would be a kind gesture to join them.”

Zuko nods, grateful for the excuse, and takes one of the farther seats. There are two rows of extra chairs, one on each side of the room, running parallel to the table’s long edges. One row’s filled with allies of the Fire Nation, and the other with people on the Earth Kingdom’s side.

Zuko looks at the chair closest to Uncle and finds the general whom he challenged to an Agni Kai sitting there. He immediately flees to the other end of the room, near the door, and winds up next to a Fire Nation tax collector and across the room from Sokka, who gives him a jaunty wave. Zuko waves back.

The peace talks begin.

It’s all amicable, shockingly so. Uncle’s at his friendliest, and King Kuei seems surprisingly easygoing- borderline oblivious to the more severe crimes of the Fire Nation, but Zuko doesn’t complain- and they hammer out one compromise after another. On the rare occasions when they disagree, Aang intervenes, calm and wise beyond his years, and guides them to a solution.

It’s easier than Zuko could have ever expected. He tries to be grateful. He closes his eyes and disciplines his breath and waits for calm.

It doesn’t come.

At last, he looks at Sokka, who’s leaning forward and watching the proceedings intently. Zuko flicks a finger and tips Sokka’s chair back, just for a second. He only means to jiggle it a little, but Sokka panics, limbs windmilling as he strains to regain stability.

As the entire room turns to look at him, he glares squarely at Zuko.

Zuko casts his eyes down, willing Sokka to do the same. When he does, Zuko concentrates and starts carving a message into the floor before him. Sokka’s eyes light up as he realizes what Zuko’s going for, and then he squints, struggling to decode the exact text. It must be a challenge to read it; Zuko can’t imagine his metalbent calligraphy’s pretty, and it’s even harder to read the characters upside-down.

Sokka looks up at Zuko with a tilt of his head, silently asking if he’s got the message right.

Zuko nods.

_Ask Toph if the island’s hyperventilating._

Sokka writes the note on paper, folds it up, and passes it to the Earth Kingdom minister beside him with a whisper. The message slowly makes its way down the line, and Zuko fidgets. “Hyperventilating”’s the wrong word, but he doesn’t know what the right word could be. He only knows that the ground of Caldera should breathe, steady and serene even when he isn’t, but now its rhythm’s fluttering out of time. It’s ridiculous to assign feelings to a mass of rock, Zuko knows that, but the ground feels _anxious._

He waits, barely breathing himself, as the slip of paper winds its way to Toph. She scowls at the admiral who hands it to her. Then she leans forward to scowl at Sokka, who definitely just passed her a message she can’t read. Zuko nearly groans.

A second later, Toph gives it to Katara, who’s sitting next to her. She opens the note up, reads it and then whispers in her ear. Toph flinches and shakes her head.

But then she shifts in her chair, digs her feet into the ground, and scowls in sudden confusion.

She mutters something to Katara, who writes a message of her own and passes it back down the line to Sokka, who reads it. Then he ties it onto his new wooden boomerang. Finally, he throws it across the room. In panic Zuko flings out two hands to catch the boomerang, but it’s got no metal for him to sense, so he misjudges the distance and completely misses on its way out. When it whips around to smack him on the head, he explodes.

“Ow!”

“Nephew?”

Though the entire room resumes its staring, Zuko doesn’t say anything at first, instead fumbling with the boomerang and untying the note.

“Zuzu,” Azula chides as Katara rushes to heal him, “I thought you learned to leave the childish games at the door-“

“There’s something wrong with the island,” Zuko interrupts. “Toph and I both feel it.”

Uncle’s concern turns to fear. “An earthquake?”

“No,” Toph says, getting to her feet across the room. “It’s not that bad.”

“It’s worse.” Zuko shivers, suddenly dotted with goosebumps. 

Visibly nervous, King Kuei adjusts his glasses. “Is there an eruption coming?”

“No way,” Sokka laughs. “No one would build their capital in the caldera of a live volcano!”

In the ensuing silence, the Fire Nation’s officials awkwardly avoid eye contact.

“While this volcano is not truly extinct,” Uncle at last admits, “it is publicly represented that way. The Fire Sages assure us there will be no eruptions for the next five centuries.”

Sokka shoots to his feet, bug-eyed, and storms up to the table. “You let fortune-tellers predict your volcano? It’s bad enough with Aunt Wu and the clouds but this is the capital city of the freaking Fire Nation, why in the _world_ would you leave this up to-“

“King Kuei,” Azula cuts in, “the Dai Li wouldn’t by any chance want you and everyone else in this room dead, would they?”

“Er…I may have recently had a slight difference of opinion with Long Feng.”

“About what?” she demands.

He wilts under her stare. “About whether I should give him my crown?”

“...Should’ve zapped him while I had the chance.”

Now everyone’s staring at her.

“Niece-“ Uncle nearly lays a comforting hand on her back before thinking better of it- “what do you know?”

She raises her chin, staring them all down. “When I was in Dai Li custody, I told them that our people and defenses would never fall. The only way to take us down would be if they turned the volcanoes against us.” She presses a hand to her mouth, choking on a peal of laughter. “It was a joke.” Her eyes narrow when nobody laughs with her. “There’s no such thing as _lavabending.”_

“There are four teams in the tunnels right now,” Zuko replies, now out of his chair with both hands and feet pressed flat to the floor. “All lavabending.” 

It’s unmistakable, and it’s _wrong._ It feels like someone’s reached directly into his veins to bend his blood.

Uncle bursts into action, organizing the evacuation, barking out orders for the emergency response, but Zuko can’t hear. He doesn’t hear anything over the broken rhythms screaming underfoot, the island that’s writhing in pain.

So he runs. He heads straight for the city perimeter, weaving through the crowds gathering in the streets, spooked by the scent of smoke and brimstone.

“Zuko, wait!” Katara calls after him.

He stumbles and goes sprawling, tripped up by a sudden earthquake. While he’s down, Katara, Toph and Azula catch up to him.

“Sokka’s organizing the evacuation,” Katara says, breathless. “But Caldera’s huge, he says there’s no way to get everyone out in time!”

Zuko pauses for one moment. Imagines the entire city burning, flooded by fire.

Where once he might have felt joy, now it’s unacceptable. 

He pushes himself up to his feet. “Sokka’s right. The Dai Li have whipped up all the magma, it feels like a hurricane down there.”

“Where are the Dai Li?” Azula snaps. “I’m going to burn them.”

“I can feel them,” Toph replies. “Four teams, just like you said.”

“You can try,” Zuko tells them, “but they’ve already riled the volcano up. Fighting them won’t stop this.”

“Then we fight the volcano.” Katara pulls the water from her flask like it’s useful against an entire mountain. “We’ve got clouds and a whole ocean; I’ll find a way to douse the flames. Toph, you need to reshape the inside of the volcano; do whatever it takes to keep the magma inside-“

Zuko breaks in: “No.”

“What?” Katara’s eyebrows shoot up, and she inhales, preparing for a shouting match-

“Avatar Roku,” he remarks coolly, “died as a master of all four elements, fighting a much smaller volcano.”

He’s glossing over the whole Sozin sabotage issue, but the point stands- when Roku faced a volcano, he found himself outmatched.

“So what?” Azula retorts. “There’s no hope at all?”

Zuko waits for a moment, trying to craft a plan. “Help Sokka evacuate. Take down the Dai Li if you can; they’ll try to interfere.”

As the alarms go up throughout the city, Zuko takes off running again. He leaves them behind, as if he has a real plan, not just the vague wisp of an intuition. He takes off alone, bursting out of the city limits and down to one of the tunnels. Reaching under his tunic he unwinds out a sword that he snuck into the meeting and plunges it into the earth, slowly drilling his way inside.

“Zuko?”

He looks up as Aang glides down in front of him. “What are you doing here?”

Aang furrows his brow. “I think I’m supposed to be here. With you.”

After a second, he nods. “We need to get to the center of the mountain, fast.”

Without question, Aang lifts his hands and _pushes,_ bending a new, perilously steep tunnel through the dirt and rock. Zuko jumps right down, drawn inexorably inside.

The closer they get, the more the floor trembles. Hot air blasts through the tunnel, a scalding bitter smack to the face.

“What’s the battle plan?”

“I don’t have one,” Zuko says. There’s no point in lying.

“Oh. Okay...”

The stone around them starts to glow, gleaming red like rubies or hot steel, illuminated by the mountain’s inner flame. Zuko picks up speed, not even bothering to silence his footfalls. The walls resound with his steps, blending with the roar of fire as he barrels towards the core, towards the burning heart of the volcano.

He stops just in time, at the edge of a sheer precipice in a massive cavern. Aang overshoots and has to fly back onto solid ground.

When Zuko peeks forward over the edge, he finds an inferno- a frothing, raging whirlpool of liquid fire, beaten to a frenzy. It lashes out, and Zuko scrambles back in terror, just barely avoiding a spray of magma to the face.

“Zuko,” Aang blurts, “please tell me you have a battle plan now!”

Zuko takes a deep breath, letting go of the initial fear to take a second look. Gazing into the heart of the volcano, he tries to imagine what a battle even _looks_ like. He could try freezing the top layer of magma, repressing the fury with a thin shield of stone. 

It won’t work.

“Aang?”

“Yeah?”

“I need you to airbend the smoke away.” He recalls a blue dragon and a red dragon. “Keep the air cool and breathable, as long as you can.”

“What will you do?”

Zuko stares down the chaos wrought by the Dai Li, but he knows this too: this land is his. He’s known these tides of fire all his life, has learned to bend and to breathe from their rhythms. And though they seem like a seething vortex right now, though the volcano’s inner flame is lashing out in pain and in rage, he knows that’s not how they really _are._

Zuko drops to the ground.

/

His ministers beg him to flee and save himself, but Iroh stays. Even as the mountain lets loose one threatening rumble after another, even as smoke starts blotting out the blue sky, he stays to help both his Earth Kingdom guests and his people. He stays, gives his orders and waits for the catastrophe to begin.

Most of the children stay too. Sokka takes command where Iroh can’t, and in the process shows more sense and focus than half the Fire Nation’s generals. Azula drags eight Dai Li agents before him, like a proud puma-kitten bringing home its first rat. Zuko and Aang go missing in the chaos, and while it’s not what he’d expected from them- from the Avatar, at least- Iroh hopes they escaped the island entirely and fled to safety.

Iroh waits for the lava to flood Caldera. For the lightning to ignite above them as the Fire Nation goes down in its own flames.

The eruption never comes.

By nightfall, they’ve survived four hours without a noticeable earthquake, and Iroh slowly, warily dares to hope. Leaving Sokka and his niece in charge of the evacuation, he follows Toph down a precipitous tunnel newly opened in the island’s side. He expected the volcano’s innards to hiss and roar, deafening to anyone who came too close. Yet all he hears is a pleasant bubbling, like that of a particularly large tea kettle.

He and Toph stumble out of the tunnel into a magma-filled cavern. Aang’s standing nearby and methodically waving his hands, stirring up a clean, cool breeze. Zuko sits beside him on the edge of a precipice, legs crossed, eyes closed. He breathes evenly, suspended in a state of perfect serenity.

“He’s lavabending,” Toph whispers, almost in reverence.

Iroh tears his eyes away and finds the whole room glowing in a steady, calm rhythm, the magma below swelling and ebbing in time with Zuko’s breaths. He sits, meditating like every firebending child is taught to do, with his palms upturned, hands cupped together as his thumbs barely touch.

Zuko sits in meditation. The volcano breathes with him, its tides at last controlled and brought to peace. Its fire dances with his inner flame, like it’s simply an oversized candle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The epilogue should be up next week.
> 
> From “The Firebending Masters”:
> 
> Toph: You're gonna need to learn to draw your firebending from a different source. I recommend the original source.  
> Sokka: How's he supposed to do that? By jumping into a volcano?  
> Toph: No. Zuko needs to go back to whatever the original source of firebending is.  
> Sokka: So...is it jumping into a volcano?


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who’s read this far <3 I am grateful for all your support, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride.

A child in green holds up her hand and immediately blurts her question. “Master Zuko, what kind of seeds are we planting today?”

Zuko- dressed in red-brown russet, as he always is these days- spins around to address her. “We’re planting sunflowers. They know where the sun is, and we can tell because they’ll bend around to face it.”

“Like me!” a boy in red exclaims across the room.

“Exactly,” Zuko says with enthusiasm he doesn’t need to force, not even a little. “Some people- firebenders, but other people too- can feel an inner flame inside them that keeps track of the sun. It’s very useful for telling time, and completely useless for sleeping in past sunrise.”

With a giggle, the children resume digging in the rich soil of the academy garden. Zuko walks around, supervising. He breaks up a minor dirt-flinging tussle that springs up in the corner (“save it for earthbending ball!”). He helps a girl in bright red silk break up the clumps in her dirt with synchronized stomps of their feet.

With earthbending.

/

It’s been five years since Fire Lord Iroh rose to the throne. Four-and-a-half years since Zuko reclaimed the title of prince, on the condition that he be inserted late in the line of succession, behind both his uncle and his sister. He’ll take the Fire Lord’s crown if tragedy strikes, but his flame has always burned differently from theirs. Iroh offered him an old crown, worn by Sozin before he became Fire Lord, but Zuko refused it. 

Instead, he’s recovered his mother’s crumpled hairpiece and bent it into a shape appropriate for his station. He keeps it in a metal safe he designed himself. He doesn’t wear it in his top-knot, most days.

Zuko’s sought other ways to serve his country.

Four years ago, he and Toph presented the leaders of their respective nations with a proposal. King Kuei and Uncle Iroh had deliberated long and hard about paying reparations to the earthbenders in the Fire Nation colonies, punished for decades for the gift of their bending. In their petition, Zuko and Toph suggested founding a premier academy for earthbending, bankrolled by the Fire Nation and set in the colonies, open to any earthbender who wished to learn. The two men- world leaders, kings of fearsome nations- took a look at Toph and Zuko- completely united in their stubbornness- and agreed at once.

Three-and-a-half years back, once they’d negotiated the land rights and built out the necessary facilities, Toph and Zuko declared they’d teach _everyone_ they could _._ They’d never prejudge anyone’s potential because of their age or gender or health or national background. The crowds came, and they hired a whole team of earthbending masters to help out and never turned any student away...

Which is how they ended up with a ton of little kids sent to school by earthbending parents, too young to do anything themselves just yet.

“We’re definitely too young to have this many babies,” Toph grumbled. 

Zuko had just laughed and improvised a whole new set of lessons for them, writing to an old teacher in Ba Sing Se’s Lower Ring for advice. That’s how he came to teach pottery and gardening, alongside the classic earthbending. Then it turned out most kids adore plunging their hands into wet dirt and clay, and he had trouble getting them to _quit_ and move onto regular earthbending when the time came. He let them stay, and older students started to join in the fun, even non-earthbender adults who wanted to support friends and relatives in their training. Who wanted to understand.

(The Fire Lord comes on occasion. He leaves behind the crown and all titles but “Uncle,” and he sits quietly at his desk and pours all his focus into forming little jars and pinch pots. Zuko promises they’ll make a teacup, next time.)

/

Two-and-a-half years ago, Zuko was bending the last of the clay off the ceiling- why did it always end up on the ceiling?- when he heard a snuffle coming from the supply closet.

“Hae-won? What’s wrong?”

“It’s my ninth birthday,” she said, face buried in her knees.

“I want to say ‘happy birthday,’ but-” he wrinkles up his brow- “I think I’m missing something.”

“I still can’t bend, which means I’m never going to bend.” She turned red-rimmed eyes up at him. “But all my friends are here, but I don’t _like_ art or flowers, and I don’t want to be useless.”

Zuko took a moment to untangle that painfully familiar train of thought. “...Do you like swords?”

That’s how Master Piandao got dragged out of his idyllic manor in the countryside and into running the advanced martial arts classes, open even to non-benders. With all the mixed-race families in the colonies, other children inevitably became _firebenders,_ which is how Zuko got Uncle to push Master Jeong Jeong back into service.

(Zuko substitutes for them both when needed. For firebending classes, he dredges up the katas from his own childhood, tells old legends about sun and life, and bends sand onto the little fires that inevitably break out. When he’s really at his wits’ end, he assigns everyone quiet meditation practice over candles and tries to shut down the whining: “The Fire Lord would tell you to do the same thing if he were here! I mean, not as an order, just as friendly advice, but still...”)

(In time, he formalizes the meditation classes and opens them to earthbenders, upon learning other schools put breathing exercises at the start of their earthbending curricula. Toph grumbled for days before admitting air could have any connection to earthbending. It was a matter of spite- “Master” Yu wasted seven years of her life on pretty much nothing _but_ breathing exercises.)

Five years after Iroh becomes the Fire Lord, Zuko’s days are _chaos._ New kids always start off scared of him- he looks older than he is, with a permanent frown seared into half his face- and he can’t blame them. But then they meet Toph, Piandao, and Jeong Jeong, and they find out about the three flavors of creeping crystal that Zuko grows in his office just to comfort crying children, and they decide he’s actually the least scary of the lot. As a result, he spends most of his days surrounded by the youngest children in the school, half his size with double the knack for trouble.

“Yes, Maya, it was mean of her to insult your pot. But no, that’s not an excuse to _bend it up her nose!”_

/

Zuko spends his days working with young children (and Toph, who can’t resist regularly demolishing chunks of their building on dares from their students). It’s why he meditates most mornings, every time the sun and his inner flame conspire to wake him up too early. 

Those mornings, he breaks off a shard of fire-flake-flecked creeping crystal, laces up his dancing shoes, and hikes up the nearby mountain. It’s set deep in what used to be the Earth Kingdom mainland, nowhere near the ocean and thus nothing like an island if you keep your eyes open. On the other hand, it’s a live volcano, a fact that Zuko and only Zuko counts as a plus.

He closes his eyes and breathes, in and out. He feels the magma’s currents deep below, flowing up and down again. 

It feels like home.

This place is full of tension and ambiguities, like all the colonies are. It’s officially Fire Nation. It’s kind of Earth Kingdom, too. There’s constant friction, no thanks to the people who try to classify it one way or the other, and if Zuko’s reading the tea leaves right, it’ll probably end up breaking off into its own country entirely. It’s a self-contradictory teapot forever threatening to boil over, and though he and Toph try to avoid the politics they keep opening their big mouths and falling right in. 

This place is bubbling over with tension, with tension and potential and _hope._

Zuko sits on the volcano, legs draped over the lily-studded edge of the caldera, finally approaching peace. 

/

Sometimes, the school holds expert demonstrations. 

The first- Azula’s lightning exhibition- sparked endless behind-the-scenes drama (“We have a whole closet of dummies; what do you mean you have to shoot lightning at a _human_ target?”). And _that’s_ how they discovered, two years back, that Zuko could redirect lightning if he was wearing enough conductive armor. It clocked in as the most-attended event they’ve ever had. Azula’s Crown Princess of the Fire Nation now, respected around the world for her gleeful demolition of Father’s old policies, but that record’s what she boasts most about when Zuko’s around. 

Katara drew crowds too, with a demonstration of waterbending techniques that could be re-interpreted for bending fire or sand. Aang led a masterclass on meditation that _no one complained about,_ not even the preschoolers who whine every time Zuko suggests a breathing exercise. The Avatar’s just blessed like that.

(Jet sent a letter last week, about maybe giving a lesson on hook swords. Zuko’s still figuring how to respond to that one.) 

So they hold expert demos regularly. There’s nothing out of the ordinary about holding an exhibition of “Fire Nation-style Earthbending.” No reason for Zuko to fidget behind the curtains of their theater like a panicking kid, like an imposter at risk of being found out-

“Hey.” Toph swaggers up to him and jabs him in the arm. “Any reason your heart sounds like an angry volcano?”

Oh- he’s leaning against a stone column. Of course she can tell.

“What kind of volcano would you prefer?”

“Right now? The happy dormant kind.”

He huffs out a laugh. “There’s no such _thing_ as Fire Nation-style Earthbending. You know that, right?”

“Let’s review your routine.” She unfolds one finger at a time. “Metalbending.”

(During his opening speech, Zuko intends to metalbend his name on the ceiling, with such quiet, subtle movements nobody will notice until he points it out.) 

“Disintegration.”

(As it turns out, he can turn pots to dust by glaring impressively at them.)

“The lousiest stances they’ve ever seen.”

(Zuko snorts, because they haven’t managed to settle this argument in five years. He still draws his forms from firebending. He’s going to go up against Toph with stances like _dance,_ and he’s going to survive, and it should shock every other earthbender around.)

“After that,” she adds, “you’ll talk about that time you stopped a volcanic eruption by meditating at it, and for the finale you’re going to conduct electricity around the entire room-”

“As it turns out,” Zuko deadpans, “I know all this.”

“I don’t think you get it though,” she protests, throwing up her hands. “That’s all your stuff, that _you_ came up with because of where you’re from and how you grew up. Ta-da! Fire Nation-style Earthbending.”

“I wasn’t trying to pioneer a new style,” he mutters in response. “I was just making stuff up.”

“That’s what being an inventor means, Ashhole.”

(Zuko misses the good old days of “Dusty.”)

“I appreciate the pep-talk,” he says. He considers swallowing down the next sentence but opts for honesty. “But the last time I went out in front of a crowd specifically to show off my earthbending, it didn’t...go so well.”

Toph’s expression shifts through confusion and concern before settling on something almost _fond._

“If you freeze, it’ll be okay this time.”

“Really?”

She punches him on the shoulder- lovingly. “You’re not going out there alone. If something breaks, we fix it together.”

The lights go up onstage, and the audience breaks out cheering. It’s a huge crowd. Maybe enough to beat Azula’s record and bring her back for a second round. 

Toph nudges Zuko again, and he inhales deep and passes the curtains right on cue. “Hi, everyone. I’d like to introduce Master Toph Beifong, the best earthbender in the world!”

Toph charges through the curtains a second later. “And this is Master Zuko, prince of the Fire Nation, an earthbender in the world!”

It’s been a running joke of theirs for years now, but he beams at her anyway. 

“Earthbender.”

It’s one title that never gets old.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That’s all, folks <3
> 
> (I do have a couple additional ideas for this AU, but I’m inclined to skip writing them. I also have a very, very vague outline for a waterbender Zuko longfic, which might interest earthbender Zuko fans...)
> 
> If you’re curious about the WIPs that are more likely to get finished, here’s a partial list of my upcoming-ish projects:
> 
> \- (gen + a possible Zukka subplot) A “June adopts Zuko” AU, [already partially posted.](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1974361) It’s got several times more miscommunication and secret identity shenanigans than the earthbender Zuko AU, which is really saying something.
> 
> \- (Zukka) A mid-length modern AU set at the Summer Olympics. Once again, the secret identity shenanigans are off the charts. [Update: already posted.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29367204/chapters/72140295)
> 
> \- (Zukka) A canon-divergent longfic where Zuko joins the Gaang early...because they might’ve accidentally killed him a little and now he’s stuck haunting Sokka, who doesn’t believe in ghosts. Will be posted in late 2020 or 2021, hopefully. [Update: already partially posted.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28206249/chapters/69118440)
> 
> \- (gen) A canon-divergent longfic where Zuko gets, ahem, recruited by the Dai Li. [Update: already posted; it wound up being 10k.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28540536)
> 
> \- (Zukka) A post-canon longfic starring Azula as a matchmaker. The working title is “Chaos novel.” Posting date: again, no clue.

**Author's Note:**

> Alternate titles include “Zuko: The First Swordbender,” “The Day of Black Son,” “Tap Dancing Your Way to Victory Over the Fire Lord” and (thanks to Just_Will for pointing out this possible pun) "Dramatic Irony."
> 
> I very much appreciate comments, bookmarks and kudos <3


End file.
